home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- <text>
- <title>
- (1980) Died:John Lennon
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1980 Highlights
- </history>
- <link 07644>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- December 22, 1980
- COVER STORY
- The Last Day in the Life
- John Lennon: 1940-1980
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>John Lennon is shot to death at 40, and a bright dream fades
- </p>
- <p> Just a voice out of the American night. "Mr. Lennon," He
- started to turn around. There is no knowing whether John
- Lennon, saw, for what would have been the second time that day,
- the young man in the black raincoat stepping out of the shadows.
- The first shot hit him that fast, through the chest. There
- were at least three others.
- </p>
- <p> Not that night, or the next day, but a little later, after the
- terror ebbed and the grief could be managed, Lennon's wife, Yoko
- Ono, took their five-year-old son Sean to the spot in the
- apartment courtyard where she had seen his father murdered. She
- had already shown Sean a newspaper with his father's picture on
- the front page. She tried to do what everyone else has done
- since that Monday night. She tried to explain.
- </p>
- <p> Like everyone else, too, the boy asked simple questions to
- which there would never be simple or satisfactory answers. If,
- as was being said, the man liked his father so much, why did he
- shoot him? His mother explained: "He was probably a confused
- person." Not good enough. Better to know. Sean Lennon said,
- if he was confused or rally meant to kill. His mother said that
- was up to the courts to decide, and Sean wanted to know which
- courts she was talking about: tennis or basketball? Then Sean
- cried, and he also said, "Now Daddy is part of God. I guess
- when you die you become much more bigger because you're part of
- everything."
- </p>
- <p> Sean did not really know or understand about the Beatles, or
- what his father was to the world. But Sean will surely know,
- soon enough, that his father did not have to die to become part
- of everything. Given the special burden and grace of his great
- gift, he already was. Not just for his wife or son but for more
- people than anyone could ever begin to number, the killing of
- John Lennon was a death in the family.
- </p>
- <p> For all the official records, the death would be called
- murder. For everyone who cherished the sustaining myth of the
- Beatles--which is to say, for much of an entire generation that
- is passing, as Lennon was, at age 40, into middle age, and
- coming suddenly up against its own mortality--the murder was
- something else. It was an assassination, a ritual slaying of
- something that could hardly be named. Hope, perhaps; or
- idealism. Or time. Not only lost, but suddenly dislocated,
- fractured.
- </p>
- <p> The outpouring of grief, wonder and shared devastation that
- followed Lennon's death had the same breadth and intensity as
- the reaction to the killing of a world figure: some bold and
- popular politician, like John or Robert Kennedy, or a spiritual
- leader, like Martin Luther King Jr. But Lennon was a creature
- of poetic political metaphor, and his spiritual consciousness
- was directed inward, as a way of nurturing and widening his
- creative force. That was what made the impact, and the
- difference--the shock of his imagination, the penetrating and
- pervasive traces of his genius--and it was the loss of all that,
- in so abrupt and awful a way, that was mourned last week, all
- over the world. The last Day in the Life, "I read the news
- today, oh boy..."
- </p>
- <p> Sorrow was expressed, sympathies extended by everyone from
- Presidents and Presidents-elect. Prime Ministers and Governors
- and mayors to hundreds of fans who gathered at the arched
- entryway to the Lennons' Manhattan apartment building, the
- Dakota, crying and praying, singing and decorating the tall
- gates with wreaths and single flowers and memorial banners.
- CHRISTMAS IN HEAVEN, read one. Another recalled the magical
- innovation of a childhood memory that became one of his finest
- songs: Strawberry Fields Forever.
- </p>
- <p> Ringo Starr flew to New York to see Yoko. George Harrison,
- "shattered and stunned," went into retreat at his home in
- Oxfordshire, England. Paul McCartney, whom Lennon plainly loved
- and just as plainly hated like the brother he never had, said,
- "I can't tell you how much it hurts to lose him. His death is
- a bitter, cruel blow--I really loved the guy." Having no wish
- to contribute to the hysteria that always follows the grief at
- such public mournings, McCartney, who has hired two bodyguards
- to protect himself and his family, said he would stay home in
- Sussex, England, even if there was a funeral. There was not.
- Lennon's body was cremated in a suburban New York cemetery, and
- Ono issued a statement inviting everyone "to participate from
- wherever you are" in a ten-minute silent vigil on Sunday
- afternoon.
- </p>
- <p> Before that, it had been a week of tributes. Radio stations
- from New Orleans to Boston cleared the air waves for Lennon and
- Beatles retrospectives. In Los Angeles, more than 2,000 people
- joined in a candlelight vigil at Century City; in Washington,
- D.C., several hundred crowded the steps of the Lincoln Memorial
- in a "silent tribute" that recalled the sit-ins of the '60s.
- Record stores all over the country reported sellouts on the new
- Lennon-Ono album, Double Fantasy, their first record in five
- years, as well as the back stock of Lennon's previous records.
- </p>
- <p> Some reaction was tragic. A teen-age girl in Florida and a man
- of 30 in Utah killed themselves, leaving notes that spoke of
- depression over Lennon's death. On Thursday, Ono said, "This
- is not the end of an era. The '80s are still going to be a
- beautiful time, and John believed in it."
- </p>
- <p> All the brutal and finally confounding facts of the killing
- were examined like runes and held up to the light like
- talismans, small shards of some awful psychic puzzle. A pudgy
- Georgia-born ex-security guard from Hawaii named Mark David
- Chapman fired his shots at Lennon from what the police call
- "combat stance": in a stiff crouch, one hand wrapped around the
- butt of his newly purchased revolver, the other around the wrist
- to steady it. As Lennon took six staggering steps, Chapman, 25,
- simply stood still, and then went with the arresting officers
- like a model citizen who had been unfairly rousted on a traffic
- bust. Chapman's personal history showed, in retrospect, many
- ominous byways, but immediately after the shooting, he offered
- no explanations. And no regrets.
- </p>
- <p> Chapman arrived in New York three days before the killing,
- checked into a Y.M.C.A. nine blocks from Lennon's apartment, and
- started hanging out in front of the building, waiting for Lennon
- like any other fan. There were usually fans at the gates of the
- Dakota, a grand, gloomy, high-maintenance Gothic fortress
- overlooking the west side of Central Park, because the building
- houses several celebrities: Lauren Bacall, Roberta Flack,
- Leonard Bernstein. Fans of the Beatles and Lennon lovers
- accounted for the largest portion of the curious. Two
- unidentified women told an ABC television reporter that they had
- fallen into conversation with Chapman outside the Dakota. Said
- one, "He just seemed like a really nice, genuine, honest person
- who was there because he admired John." Others, like WPLJ Disc
- Jockey Carol Miller, who lives near the Dakota, had noticed
- Chapman and thought "he looked strange. He was older than the
- kids who hung around there." When Miller first heard that
- Lennon had been shot, Chapman's face flashed in her mind.
- </p>
- <p> On Saturday night, Chapman hailed a cab and told Driver Mark
- Snyder to take him to Greenwich Village. On the way he boasted
- that he had just dropped off the tapes of an album John Lennon
- and Paul McCartney made that day. He said that he was the
- recording engineer and that they had played for three hours.
- </p>
- <p> On Monday afternoon Chapman spotted Lennon and asked him to
- autograph an album. Lennon hastily scribbled his name and
- climbed into a waiting car to take him to a recording studio.
- Did Chapman feel slighted by Lennon? Possibly. But the night
- before he had suddenly checked out of the Y and moved into the
- cushier Sheraton Center hotel and bought himself a big meal.
- It was as if he were rewarding himself in advance for some proud
- accomplishment. Now on Monday, only hours after getting
- Lennon's autograph, Chapman was waiting again, this time in the
- shadows of the entryway, with a gun. When the police grabbed him
- after the shooting, they found he still had the autographed
- album with him. He also had a paperback copy of J.D. Salinger's
- The Catcher in the Rye.
- </p>
- <p> Lennon was no stranger to threats on his life. As early as
- 1964, at the first Beatles concert in France, Lennon got a note
- backstage that read, "I am going to shoot you at 9 tonight."
- He had only lately become accustomed to the freewheeling anarchy
- of New York street life: "I can go out this door now and go
- into a restaurant...Do you want to know how great that is?" he
- told the BBC. But friends remember him as being guarded both
- in public and around the few people he and Ono met during the
- long years of self-willed isolation that were only ending with
- the completion of the new album. "John was always wary," says
- his friend, Actor Peter Boyle. "Maybe partly because he was
- extraordinarily tuned in. He'd pick up on people, and they'd
- pick up on him."
- </p>
- <p> Lennon also shared with many other rockers a kind of
- operational fatalism, a sense that ding your best, whether on
- record or in concert, required laying yourself open, making
- yourself vulnerable. It was not only the pressures and excesses
- of the rock-'n'-roll life that moved the Who's Pete Townshend
- to remark, "Rock is going to kill me somehow." And it was not
- just the death of Elvis Presley that Lennon had in mind when he
- said to friends in 1978, "If you stay in this business long
- enough, it'll get you."
- </p>
- <p> Rock, Lennon knew as well as anyone, is the applied art of big
- risk and big feelings. The songs he and Paul McCartney wrote
- for the Beatles, separately and together, brought more people
- up against the joy and boldness of rock music than anything else
- ever has. It wasn't just that Aaron Copland and Leonard
- Bernstein were taking the Beatles as seriously--and a good deal
- more affectionately--than Stockhausen. The worldwide appeal of
- the Beatles had to do with their perceived innocence, their
- restless idealism that stayed a step or two ahead of the times
- and once in a while turned, bowed low, gave the times a razz and
- dared to catch up. The slow songs were heart stoppers, the fast
- ones adrenaline rushes of wit, low-down love and high, fabulous
- adventure. The songs became, all together, an orchestration of
- a generation's best hopes and fondest dreams.
- </p>
- <p> The songs Lennon wrote later on his own--Imagine and
- Whatever Gets You Thru the Night, Instant Karma and Give Peace a
- Chance and the gentle and unapologetic Watching the Wheels from
- the new album, or the gorgeous seasonal anthem, Happy Xmas (War
- is Over), which he recorded with Ono in 1972--kept the standard
- high and his conscience fine-tuned. The political songs were
- all personal, the intimate songs all singular in their fierce
- insistence on making public all issues of the heart, on working
- some common moral out of private pain. Rock music is still
- benefitting from lessons that Lennon fought hard for, then
- passed along. All his music seemed to be torn from that small,
- stormy interior where, as Robert Frost once wrote, "work is play
- for mortal stakes."
- </p>
- <p> Despite the universality of interest in his death, Lennon
- remained chiefly the property--one might even be tempted to say
- prisoner--of his own generation. Some--those who regarded the
- Beatles as a benign cultural curiosity, and Lennon as some
- overmoneyed songwriter with a penchant for political
- pronouncements and personal excess--wondered what all the fuss
- was about and could not quite understand why some of the junior
- staff at the office would suddenly break into tears in the
- middle of the day. "A garden-variety Nobel prizewinner would
- not get this kind of treatment," said a teacher in Oxford,
- England. Across the Atlantic, in schools and on college
- campuses, those from other generations showed almost as great
- a sense of puzzlement, even distance, as of loss. Gretchen
- Steininger, 16, a junior at Evergreen Park High School in
- suburban Chicago, said "I recognize the end of an era--my
- mom's."
- </p>
- <p> So a little reminder was in order, a small history lesson, and
- there was no one better to lead the class than Bruce
- Springsteen. Lennon had lately become warmly admiring of
- Springsteen, especially his hit single Hungry Heart.
- Springsteen could probably have let Lennon's death pass
- unremarked, and few in the audience at his Philadelphia concert
- last Tuesday would have been troubled. But instead of ripping
- right into the first song, Springsteen simply said, "If it
- wasn't for John Lennon, a lot of us would be some place much
- different tonight. It's a hard world that asks you to live with
- a lot of things that are unlivable. And it's hard to come out
- here and play tonight, but there's nothing else to do."
- </p>
- <p> Then Bruce and the E Street Band tore into Springsteen's own
- anthem, Born to Run, making it clear that playing was the best
- thing to do. Guitarist Steve Van Zandt let the tears roll down
- his face, and Organist Danny Federici hit the board so hard he
- broke a key. By the second verse, the song turned into a
- challenge the audience was happy to accept: "I wanna know love
- is wild, I wanna know love is real," Springsteen yelled, and
- they yelled back. By the end, it sounded like redemption. John
- Lennon knew that sound too. He could use it like a chord change
- because he had been chasing it most of his life.
- </p>
- <p> John Lennon grew up on Penny Lane, and after a time he moved
- to a house outside Liverpool, hard by a boys' reformatory. There
- was another house in the neighborhood where John and his pals
- would go to a party and sell lemonade bottles for a penny. The
- house was called Strawberry Fields. His boyhood was neither as
- roughly working-class as early Beatles p.r. indicated, nor quite
- as benign as the magical association of those place names might
- suggest. But John's adolescence in the suburbs, the garden
- outside the back door and the warm ministrations of his Auntie
- Mimi did not diminish either the pain or the sense of
- separateness that was already stirring.
- </p>
- <p> His father, a seaman named Alfred, left home shortly after
- John was born, and his mother Julia sent him to her sister Mimi
- because, it was said, she could not support her child. John was
- 4 1/2 when he was farmed out to the suburbs. All the sorrow,
- rage and confusion of this early boyhood were taken up again and
- again in songs like Julia and Mother. These early years were
- not an unhealed wound for Lennon, but more nearly a root, a deep
- psychic wellspring from which he could draw reserves of hard
- truth.
- </p>
- <p> Reserves of another sort gave him trouble even early on. "In
- one way, I was always hip," Lennon remarked recently in Playboy,
- during an interview that could stand as lively proof that some
- of the best Lennon/Ono art was their life. "I was hip in
- kindergarten. I was different from the others...There was
- something wrong with me. I thought, because I seemed to see
- things other people didn't see. I was always seeing things in
- a hallucinatory way." Lennon's songs made peace with those
- hallucinations and expanded them--when psychedelics, psychiatry
- sort of domestic mysticism while keeping them always within
- reach, as a man might keep a flashlight on a nightstand in case
- he had to get up in the dark.
- </p>
- <p> Lennon was already well into his teens, living 15 minutes away
- from his mother but seldom seeing her, when rock 'n' roll
- grabbed hold of him and never let loose. All the raw glories
- of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee
- Lewis shook him to his shoe. He responded with the rowdiness
- of spirit and emotional restlessness that already set him apart
- from his peers and caused their parents concern. Paul
- McCartney's father warned his son to steer clear of John, which
- amounted to an open if inadvertent invitation to friendship.
- </p>
- <p> By his 16th year, John had formed his first band, the
- Quarrymen, and Paul McCartney had enlisted as guitar player. John
- and Paul began to write songs together almost as soon as they had
- finished tuning up, and they played any gig the band could get.
- By the end of 1956, though he had his first group and a best
- friend, Lennon suffered a lasting wound. His mother was killed
- in an accident, while she stood waiting for a bus. As he said,
- "I lost her twice."
- </p>
- <p> Two years later, George Harrison had joined the Quarrymen, and
- the band was actually earning some money. They had their own
- fans, and a growing reputation that took them to club dates in
- the gritty seaport of Hamburg, West Germany, where they
- eventually changed their name to the Beatles and got a double
- dose of the seamier side of rock life. Lennon, who like the rest
- of the boys favored black leather jackets, pegged pants and
- stomper boots, was sending long and passionate mash notes back
- home to Cynthia Powell. "Sexiest letters this side of Henry
- Miller," he observed.
- </p>
- <p> He was also a student at the Liverpool College of Art while
- the Quarrymen were still gigging around. "I knew John would
- always be a bohemian," Aunt Mimi recalled. "But I wanted him to
- have some sort of job. Here he was nearly 21 years old, touting
- round stupid halls for L3 a night. Where was the point in that?"
- </p>
- <p> Well, the point was the music, a peak-velocity transplant of
- American rock, with its original blistering spirit not only
- restored but exalted. There was some concern for the future,
- however. A Liverpool record-store owner named Brian Epstein
- thought he might be able to lend a hand there. He signed on as
- the group's manager in 1961. By the end of the following year,
- the boys got their first record contract and their first
- producer, George Martin, who remained aboard for the crazy
- cruise that came to be called Beatlemania. There was one final
- change of personnel: Drummer Pete Best was replaced by a
- gentleman named Richard Starkey, who favored quantities of heavy
- jewelry, most of it worn on the digits, and who went by the name
- of Ringo Starr.
- </p>
- <p> It took just a month for the second Beatles single, Please
- Please Me, to reach the top of the English charts. That was in
- January of 1963. By the end of that year, they had released She
- Loves You and appeared live on a BBC variety show in front of
- thousands of screaming fans in the audience and unverifiable
- millions of new converts and dazed parents sitting at home in
- front of the telly. I Want to Hold Your Hand came out in the
- U.S. in the first week of 1964, and it seemed then for a while
- that both sides of the Atlantic were up for grabs. Beatles
- forever.
- </p>
- <p> Some history becomes myth, some myth goes down in history, some
- statistics boggle the mind: the Beatles have sold, all over
- the world, upwards of 200 million records. They made history
- so quickly, and so seismically, that their chronology can be
- given like a code, or an association game in which words,
- phrases, snatches of lyrics, names, can stand for whole years.
- Even the skeptical on either side of the Beatles generation
- will be startled to see how easily they can play along, Start
- off with an easy one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you're off...Ed
- Sullivan. Jelly babies. Plaza Hotel. Moptops. Arthur and A
- Hard Day's Night. The Maharishi and M.B.E.s. Sergeant Pepper.
- LSD. Apple. "More popular than Jesus." Shea Stadium. White
- Album. Yesterday. "I'd love to turn you on." Jane. Patti.
- Cynthia. Linda. Yoko. "Paul is dead." Abbey Road. Let It
- Be.
- </p>
- <p> The history and the resonance of those fragments are so strong
- that even out of chronological sequence they form their own
- associations, like a Joseph Cornell collage. Some of the colors
- may be psychedelic, but the shadings are the pastel of memory,
- the patina made of remembered melody. Lennon, the only wedded
- Beatle--he had married Cynthia in 1962 and had a son,
- Julian--had early been typed as the most restless, outspoken
- and creative of the group, even though he led, outwardly, the
- most settled life. There was paradox in this popular portrait,
- just as there was considerable tension in Lennon's belief that
- the well-noted contradictions were true. There were both beauty
- and ambition in his music, and a full measure of turmoil too. He
- was experimenting with drugs and working up some of the material
- that would eventually find its way into Sergeant Pepper's Lonely
- Hearts Club Band, when he walked into a London gallery in 1966
- and there, among ladders, spyglasses, nail boards, banners and
- other props of her art, met Yoko Ono.
- </p>
- <p> The daughter of a well-to-do Japanese banker, Ono, now 57, was
- born in Tokyo. She had lived in San Francisco before World War
- II, foraged for food back home during it, and afterward returned
- to the States, where she attended Sarah Lawrence College and
- became interested in the far-flung reaches of the avant-garde.
- Her first husband was a Japanese musician. The marriage so
- offended Ono's mother that she never reconciled with her
- daughter. She worked on concerts for John Cage, became
- associated with other artists such as La Monte Young and
- Charlotte Moorman, the topless cellist whose staging of and
- participation in art "events" came a little later to be called
- happenings. Ono married again, a conceptual artists named Tony
- Cox, and they had a daughter, Kyoko. Ono once brought the baby
- on-stage during a concert as "an uncontrollable instrument."
- Eventually, Cox and Kyoko went to Japan, and Ono to England.
- Her artworks, or happenings, began to show a sense of humor that
- was both self-mocking and affirmative, and when John Lennon
- climbed a ladder to look through a telescope at that London
- gallery, what he saw was no distant landscape but a simple YES.
- </p>
- <p> The other Beatles were not delighted to have Ono around.
- Besides whatever personal antagonisms or random jealousies might
- have existed, one suspects now, Paul, George and Ringo may have
- considered her dedicated avant-gardism somewhat inimical to the
- best popular instincts of their music. For her part, she felt
- she was under heavy surveillance. "I sort of went to bed with
- this guy that I liked and suddenly the next morning I see these
- three in-laws standing there," she recalled recently. John,
- separated from Cynthia, fell in love with Yoko and her ideas.
- Some of her conceptual art had the same intellectual
- playfulness as his lyrics, and Lennon became a collaborator in
- many of her projects. They made films--of flies crawling, of
- dozens of bare buns made records, including the notorious Two
- Virgins which they posed naked, front and back. Shock!
- Scandal! Grim predictions for the future!
- </p>
- <p> In fact, there was already a fair amount of dissension among
- the members of the band: McCartney wanted to get out more and
- play for the folks, Lennon wanted to work in the recording
- studio, like an artist with a canvas. The ideological pressures
- and upheavals of the decade made the four Beatles stand out in
- even sharper contrast to each other. John became much more
- political, George more spiritual, Paul seemingly more larky, and
- Ringo more social. In the more than two years between Sergeant
- Pepper and Abbey Road, Lennon and McCartney wrote, separately
- and still (but more tenuously) together, some of their greatest
- songs (Penny Lane, All you Need is Love, and Strawberry Fields
- Forever). But if the turmoil had an immediate productive side,
- it also took an inevitable toll. In 1969, after the completion
- of Abbey Road, John told the boys he was leaving.
- </p>
- <p> That year, McCartney went his own way and that, one would have thought,
- was that. End of Beatles, end of era. But the Beatles would
- never go away because their music endured; it became part of a
- common heritage, a shared gift. No matter how many times they
- were played in elevators or gas stations, Beatles songs were too
- vibrant ever to qualify as "standards." That these were Beatles
- songs, not the single expression of an individual, needs to be
- remembered amid all the Lennon eulogies, which call him the
- strong creative force of the group.
- </p>
- <p> In the process of riding out all the massive changes of the
- '60s and bringing about a few on their own, the Beatles also
- trashed an elementary law of geometry: this was one whole that
- was greater than the sum of its parts. Lennon was unfairly used
- as a means to put McCartney in his place, although Lennon had
- taken pains lately to redefine details of his collaboration with
- Paul, and to make sure credit was distributed accurately. The
- melodic range of the music ran from marching band to rhythm and
- blues, from tonal stunt flying to atonal acrobatics, once in a
- while all in the same song. The Beatles sang ballads that could
- almost be Elizabethan, rockers that still sound as if they come
- from the distant future, and it was hard to peg all that
- invention to any single source. Lennon joked about walking into
- a restaurant and being saluted by the band with a rendition of
- Yesterday, a pure McCartney effort. Many radio and video
- memorials to Lennon included Let It Be, another Beatles tune
- that was all McCartney.
- </p>
- <p> If it was hard to keep the credits straight with all the
- Beatles, it was harder still for them to keep their friendly
- equilibrium. McCartney, married to Linda Eastman and staying
- close to the hearthside, released a series of albums that were
- roundly drubbed as corny, until he broke through splendidly in
- 1973 with Band on the Run. Lennon, married to Ono and living
- in New York, released a great solo record, Plastic Ono Band,
- then threw himself headlong into uncertainty. He and Ono lived
- in a series of elaborate post-hippie crash pads, became obsessed
- not only with artistic experimentation but with radical
- political flamboyance. Lennon's subsequent albums remained
- achingly personal, but turned increasingly random, unfocused.
- They were indignant and assaultive, adrift.
- </p>
- <p> When he and Ono separated for a time in the early '70s, Lennon
- went on an 18-month bender of drink, drugs and general
- looniness. "We were all drinking too much and tearing up
- houses," recalls one of his cronies at the time, Drummer Jim
- Keltner. "No one drank like he did. He had broken up with Ono
- and was with another woman at the time. Suddenly, he just
- started screaming out Ono's name. That separation from her
- almost killed him." Being treated as some sort of witchy
- parasite was no treat for the estranged Mrs. Lennon either, and
- when they both finally reconciled, they changed their lives in
- unexpected ways.
- </p>
- <p> Lennon released one more record--a collection of rock
- oldies--then settled back with Ono in the Dakota to raise their
- son Sean, who was born on Oct. 9, 1975, the day of his father's
- birthday. Said Lennon: "We're like twins." Occasionally, John
- and Ono would go public, often to fight the ultimately
- unsuccessful attempts of the Nixon Justice Department to deport
- Lennon on an old marijuana conviction in England. Mostly,
- however, they stayed at home, rearing Sean, redecorating the 25
- room rooms in their four Dakota apartments (art deco and
- artifacts of ancient Egypt, including a sarcophagus in the
- living room; blue clouds painted on the ceiling of a downstairs
- office), expanding their financial holdings (Lennon left an
- estate estimated at $235 million), buying property and Holstein
- cows.
- </p>
- <p> The Holsteins were selected because they were meant to yield
- nourishment, not be slaughtered for it. Ono took care of all
- the details, and Lennon did not know about the sale of the cows
- until he read an item in the paper. He was more pleased than
- surprised. "Only Yoko," he said admiringly "could sell a cow for
- $250,000."
- </p>
- <p> Ono could do a lot more than that. The banker's daughter set
- herself to mastering the mysteries of commercial law and deal
- making just as, earlier, she had wrestled with the exotic
- exigencies of John Cage. She met the attorneys and the
- accountants; she supervised the buying up of property in Palm
- Beach, Fla., Cold Spring Harbor, an exclusive enclave on Long
- Island, and in upstate New York. When the Lennons decided to
- make another album earlier this year, it was Ono who called
- Record Executive David Geffen and worked out the deal.
- </p>
- <p> The Lennons may have been taking a step or two aside from art,
- living quietly, but they were not hermits. They were collecting
- themselves, looking for a center, a core. It seemed hard to
- understand, but shouldn't have been. Ono sat behind the desk
- and John stayed home with the little boy. Julian, Lennon's
- other, older son, was now a teen-ager who lived in Britain with
- his mother, but wore leather jackets and jeans, like his Dad
- back in the days of the Quarrymen, and talked of becoming a
- rocker. John did not see Julian often, and said recently, "I
- don't remember seeing him as a child." But Lennon suggested
- that he had lately wanted to know Julian better, and one of the
- most haunted faces in last week's gallery of grief was
- Julian's, enduring the same pain that had afflicted his father
- at almost the same age some 25 years before. He, like John, had
- lost a parent twice.
- </p>
- <p> John gloried in playing parent to Sean, and like to call
- himself a househusband. What upset traditionalists was the fact
- that he obviously reveled in his domestic role. This role
- reversal was seen by the man raised by an aunt and three of her
- sisters as no threat at all. He insisted--indeed, proved--that he was putting nothing at risk, not his manhood and not his
- artistry.
- </p>
- <p> Double Fantasy, the new record, demonstrated that. One's
- contributions are especially accessible and congenial after
- years of punk and New Wave conditioning. John's songs, simple,
- direct and melodic, were celebrations of love and domesticity
- that asked for, and required, no apology. It was not a great
- record, like Plastic Ono Band, but it might have been the start
- of another time of greatness.
- </p>
- <p> The subjects of Double Fantasy, released last month, were
- supposedly not the stuff of rock, but John Lennon never bound
- himself to tradition. "My life revolves around Sean," he told
- some radio interviewers from San Francisco on the afternoon of
- the day he was killed. "Now I have more reason to stay healthy
- and bright...And I want to be with my best friend. My best
- friend's me wife. If I couldn't have worked with her, I
- wouldn't have bothered...I consider that my work won't be
- finished until I'm dead and buried, and I hope that's a long,
- long time." As he spoke those words, Mark David Chapman waited
- for him out on the street.
- </p>
- <p> Lennon's death was not like Elvis Presley's. Presley seemed,
- at the end, trapped, defeated and hopeless. Lennon could have
- gone that way too, could have destroyed himself. But he did
- something harder. He lived. And, for all the fame and finance,
- that seemed to be what he took the most pride in.
- </p>
- <p> "He beat the rock-'n'-roll life," Steve Van Zandt said the day
- after Lennon died. "Beat the drugs, beat the fame, beat the
- damage. He was the only guy who beat it all." That was the
- victory Mark Chapman took from John Lennon, who had an abundance
- of what everyone wants and wanted only what so many others have,
- and take for granted. A home and family. Some still center of
- love. A life. One minute more.
- </p>
- <p>-- By Jay Cocks
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-