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lucifernandis · 1 month ago

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Hey! You said in an ask post that it’s speculated that John and Yoko were headed for divorce and that double fantasy was just propaganda. Could you elaborate? Is there any credible speculation or just people bashing Yoko because they don’t like her? It sounds like such an elaborate show to put on just to look good.

Hello anon.

This will be an extremely long answer.

First of all I want to make clear the following post reflects my personal opinion and I'm not claiming to know the truth better than anyone.

While I'm not writing this to demonize anyone, I personally have no investment on the hagiography promoted by official sources.

I don't think Double Fantasy is a dishonest work. I believe John Lennon loved his family and tried to express it the way he knew best: through his music. As well as I think part of Yoko Ono genuinely wanted to protect her husband at times. There must've been *something* left between them, whether it was a dysfunctional Venus in Furs type of love or just plain Stockholm syndrome.

However the marketing of their joint effort did have strong elements of propaganda, which is true of mostly everything pushed by a big corporation. Celebrities and record labels being cunning in their media presentation shouldn't be a novelty for anyone.

In this specific case, the promotion was so deceptive there was a gap between the image and the actual music. The media blitz induced the rock intelligentsia to lump Double Fantasy with cutesy Ram. For all its optimistic moments, it's nothing of the sort.

Now to get into the state of affairs of 1980, I want to discuss in more detail the househusband years and how they came to be.

It all starts in 1974. John Lennon was a hot commodity. His latest album Walls and Bridges was on the charts, he had a number one hit with Elton John and a triumphant Madison Square Garden appearance under his belt. On the personal side, he was enjoying a nurturing relationship with May Pang and had reconnected with son Julian. His social life was active and he was exploring queer culture from a more accepting place. After a destructive period, it seemed John was finally getting back on track without Paul McCartney or Yoko Ono by his side.

A couple of months later, the same man would abruptly return to his estranged wife and withdraw from public life for the next five years. It was such a bizarre turn of events that a bewildered May is still trying to make sense of the situation. So is the rest of the world.

On her book Loving John, May gives a mostly positive version of the eighteen months labelled "The Lost Weekend", which many people who socialized with the couple endorse. Far from the scenario presented on the Charles R. Jackson's novel, the period was more of a renaissance of John's productivity, sense of humor and healthy sexuality. However, the experience would later be defined as a dark chapter due to a couple of publicized incidents and John's own questionable assessment of it.

According to May, Yoko called in January 1975 and attracted John to the Dakota with a mysterious cure for smoking. Despite all warnings, he walked into what May perceived to be a trap:

John didn’t go back to the East River apartment he shared with May that night. She spent the rest the weekend trying to speak to him on the phone but couldn't get past Yoko:

They'd reunite at the dentist's office on Monday. John was in a shocking state and it didn't take him too long to announce his definitive return to the Dakota:

When John was packing his bags to leave, May asked him about the effects of the so called cure:

John was in such horrible shape that he had to postpone an interview with reporter Peter Hamill, who was surprised by his haggard look:

John's zombie-like demeanor was later confirmed by journalist Peter Hamill, who had scheduled a chat with the musician. The New York journalist found him so disoriented he wasn't even sure what year it was, and the in- terview had to be rescheduled. As Hamill put it, John resembled "a man recovering from a very serious illness."

- Lennon in America - Geoffrey Giuliano

Journalist Peter Hamill, scheduled to interview Lennon that day, encountered a man who seemed mystified to find himself back in the familiar surroundings of the Dakota. He barely had any recollections of the defining events that had taken place six weeks earlier at the New York Plaza either. His sense of time and place had certainly been better. Hamill poignantly described the former Beatle’s demeanour as one of a man recovering from “a serious illness”.

Lennon attempted to make light of the situation, describing the turn of events as little more than a mid-morning outing for coffee and papers that somehow became a permanent change of address. Their interview soon proved untenable, and was re-scheduled for a later date.

- Come Together: Lennon and McCartney in The Seventies - Richard White

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.)

- The Lives of John Lennon - Albert Goldman

Within a couple of months, the Lost Weekend was officially over.

It's clear that a strong reason pushed John back to Yoko. Not puppy love or something as bombastic as mind control (as it has been suggested) but perhaps a case of emotional blackmail coupled with narcotics. It wouldn't be out of line, given their initial bonding was heavily influenced by heroin use.

After her solo Japan tour, Yoko probably realized it was smarter to rekindle her marriage. Regardless of her motivations or the methods applied, she was successful in her intention. John settled back in the marital home and as usual Rolling Stone Magazine circulated the happy couple's news. Pete Hamill finally got his interview.

On that subject, a passage of May's book foreshadows the charm offensive of Double Fantasy and debunks a myth about the famous Madison Square Garden reunion:

Journalist Ray Connolly corroborates May's version:

John took May to a reception at the Pierre Hotel after the show. Yoko was there, and in the truncated version of events that she and John would later agree upon, they looked into each other’s eyes and that was that. Romance was rekindled and they were together again.

Actually, it wasn’t and they weren’t . . .

John did some table hopping at the party, chatted to Yoko for a while, and was intrigued as Uri Geller did some spoon bending. Then he took May home to their apartment in Sutton Place.

- Being John Lennon: A Restless Life - Ray Connolly

From that moment on, the story was that Yoko fell pregnant, John baked bread and they lived happily ever after until tragedy struck. But did they?

Hard to know for sure but it didn't stop people from wondering. If you believe Lennon Estate associates like Elliot Mintz, John's last five years of life were happy and idyllic. After his EMI/Capitol Records contract expired in January 1976, all he wanted was to focus on his family.

On the other hand, allegations of lost contact with family and former friends, calls being rejected without a word from John himself and a growing distance between husband and wife.

I'm of the opinion the truth is somewhere in between. John took pride in his new role as Sean's father but wasn't fulfilled as a human being, disconnected from his art, interests and invigorating company.

As it happened with plenty of celebrity recluses from Howard Hughes to Harper Lee, John became the target of rumors suggesting eccentric behavior and alienation from reality. Suddenly the Hollywood Vampire rock star turned into the Rapunzel of the 1970s. The beautiful princess sheltered in an ivory tower, leaving a string of disgruntled suitors behind.

One of them was no less than Mick Jagger, who publicly expressed his disappointment multiple times:

“I don’t think anyone gives a fuck what he does anymore. I don’t. He’s a cunt! He’s right over there – you can see the fucking apartment from my window. Does he ever call me? Does he ever go out? No! Changes his phone number every five minutes. And that Dakota building. Have you ever tried to get in? It’s like a jail. I’ve given up… What is all this crap? Hiding behind all this kindergarten stuff. You can bring up children and work at the same time. He’s just kow-towing to his fucking wife, probably. She’s probably trying to screen him off. I know, mate. I’ve seen it all before.

- Rolling Stones: Off The Record - Mark Paytress

Now that John and Yoko were back together, Mick almost never saw his old friend. “I like John really a lot, you know?” said Mick, who was turned away by the doorman every time he dropped by the Dakota. “He’s just kowtowing to his bleedin’ wife, probably.” Still, he often left a “Mick was here” note for John at the front door. “I know you don’t want to see anyone,” one of these read, “but if you ever do, call me.” Later Jagger would note wistfully, “He never did.”

- Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger - Christopher Andersen

"I like John very much, but he's hiding behind Sean. Yoko has him all locked up. Come on John, get out of there!"

- Interview to the London Observer, 1977

He wasn't be the only one. Other high profile friends and acquaintances would express the same frustration:

More and more, the increasingly reclusive Lennon began to shun his friends. When chums like Bowie would telephone, John would hang up on them. Another time, when Bowie and Lennon often made plans to see Ken Russell's overblown adaptation of the Who's Tommy, Lennon canceled at the last minute. He also bowed out on playing on "Listen" and "Man in the Moon," feigning fatigue.

Other situations weren't quite so easy. Rod Stewart and a gang of his friends once tried to crash John's flat, and Lennon's assistant Jon Hendricks had a difficult time getting rid of them. There were also early morning tussles with pesky fans who somehow evaded the doorman. Another superstar nuisance was Neil Sedaka, who honored Lennon by naming his latest single "Immigrant," then begged him to appear at his upcoming New York show. Elton John received a similar request from Sedaka and also declined. John admitted he felt badly about turning Sedaka down, but he longed to get out of the city.

Even his appearance at the annual Dakota party seemed forced.

Next-door neighbor and film critic Rex Reed called his attitude "shlumpy" and observed that John always kept a low profile, not wanting to draw attention to himself.

- Lennon in America - Geoffrey Giuliano

Lennon was also being bombarded with pressure to restart his stalled career. Old musical colleagues were calling: Jesse Ed Davis and Jim Keltner were among the number. Apparently ready to let bygones be bygones, even Phil Spector reached out to John. Terry Doran, the former managing director of Apple Publishing and George Harrison's close friend and aide, was another old acquaintance who approached John.

Lennon, however, remained unmoved and immovable, categorizing these appeals as "self-serving messengers panting at the door." John, perhaps too cynical, refused to acknowledge that he needed to be pushed. He thus continued to flounder.

- Lennon in America - Geoffrey Giuliano

Photographer David Nutter, who shot John and Yoko's iconic wedding pictures echoes the sentiment:

Whatever the cause, photographer David Nutter certainly thought it an unfortunate turn of events. He believed John's partnership with May both liberated and greatly relaxed the musician. Nutter was often a guest at the couple's East Side flat where a spirited Lennon had them roaring all evening with his hysterical takes on British culture. Then almost overnight he was back with Yoko. The photographer described Ono's influence as almost hypnotic. When John reunited with his wife, Nutter noted that his friend just dropped out of their lives for a long time afterwards.

- Lennon in America - Geoffrey Giuliano

Despite lending his magazine's headlines to John and Yoko's announcements over the years, old fanboy Jann Wenner was another person who seemed puzzled by this new chapter on the couple's lives:

Meanwhile, John and Yoko went into seclusion with their new son, Sean, as Lennon became increasingly eccentric and Ono surrounded herself with dubious spiritual advisers.

“They were being completely under the radar,” said Wenner. “I got [to New York] and I didn’t see them around. He was in his drug thing for a long time. You know, didn’t go out. Maybe I couldn’t have ended up being friends with him anyway because he was so nutty and they were so in their own world.”

- Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine - Joe Hagan

According to Ray Connolly, despite the distance, John was rather interested on his Liverpool family:

He’d always been a letter writer, so with no audience outside his home to amuse, he began to write dozens of letters (typing them, actually, because he worried that his handwriting was illegible) to family and friends at home in the UK. Generally just chatty and jokey, some of them would also unpeel a John Lennon quite different from that of his recent public image, someone who cared enough about his relatives to ask them to send him recent photographs of themselves and their children. Mimi got a request too, to send him his old school tie. Although he liked to say that the past was behind him, that only the present and future mattered, his childhood never left him.

- Being John Lennon: A Restless Life - Ray Connolly

If John had no problems reaching out, it wasn't a two way street. Cynthia Lennon was open about the difficulties for Julian and the british side of the family to have any access to John:

Back in Wales Julian continued to ring John, but all too often he was unable to get past Yoko.

Julia, John's sister, experienced the same response. When, on rare occasions, Julian managed to reach his father, John seemed glad to hear from him and would chat happily about what he was up to.

- John - Cynthia Lennon

Julia Baird, the sister, confirms:

When John called me, I was always there. When I called him, however, I couldn't always talk to him. Yoko answered often. And as time went by and John's calls stopped, it was impossible for us to locate him. In fact, I wondered, did John ever pick up the phone in his own house or did Yoko walk with him in her pocket?

- John Lennon, My Brother - Julia Baird

John's childhood best friend and confidante Pete Shotton didn't fare much better:

"[After a nice visit with John in New York in the summer of 1976], he said "we must do this again", before I left New York.

I didn’t hear from him for a couple of days, so I rang him at the Dakota, on the private number he had given me. In the background I could hear Yoko shouting something and John saying: ’Look, Yoko, he’s fucking coming over and that’s it.’"

At that night’s dinner, “they hardly spoke to each other or to me. John looked pale and drawn, not as fit and healthy as he’d looked three days earlier. We didn’t talk about the old days or personal things this time. Just about the occult and mysticism. ’Still searching then, John,’ I said. He told me he’d seen a flying saucer from his window at the Dakota.“

As Pete left, John shook his hand warmly and said: “Give my love to England.“ “And that was it. I never saw him again.

- Hunter Davies - The Quarrymen

After getting fired in 1976, John's accountant Harold Seider never had a chance to talk to his client about it:

Dismissed without warning in March 1976, Seider received nothing by way of explanation except a notice, which read: "We are going to make a change. Hope you will understand. Call me." When Seider called Lennon, he did not get through.

- The Lives of John Lennon - Albert Goldman

A key player in John's life, Paul McCartney never said his calls to the Dakota were blocked but it looks like he hinted at it in some occasions, notably his songs Call Me Back Again and Getting Closer.

After their brief encounter in 1974, there was an expectation John would turn up at Paul's Venus and Mars recording sessions. May Pang says he had every intention to. However, he went back to Yoko and never made it to New Orleans. In May's words:

- Interview to the Daily Mail, 1997

Call Me Back Again seems to address a mysterious character who wasn't returning the author's calls. Bearing in mind the context, it's possible the person in question didn't even know he was being called. That's not to say John never avoided Paul intentionally, he even admitted to he was "too self involved" to call people back. However, it's apparent there was an effort in keeping John and Paul from talking too often.

Even when John did answer Paul's calls, Yoko's influence could be deeply felt:

After that, whenever Paul visited New York he’d usually telephone John, who by then had moved with Yoko to a Gothic apartment building called the Dakota on Central Park West. But, as he later recalled, he never knew what to expect; John would sometimes be friendly, sometimes hostile, sometimes ‘very frightening’. As ever, Yoko’s voice would be audible in the background, and he’d hang up thinking, ‘Thank God they’re not in my life anymore.’

- Paul McCartney: The Life - Philip Norman

Getting Closer came out in 1979 on Back to the Egg but the demo of it dates back to 1974. Once again the familiar theme of longing for an unreachable person. What gives it away is the not so subtle wordplay of "oh no don't answer" sounding just like "Ono don't answer" in the finished record. The message: "Please don't pick up the phone!".

Edging into a new decade, suspecting that Wings had flown its course, Paul started mulling over the prospect of renewing his collaboration with his old partner. Tantalized by the news that John was getting back to work in the summer of 1980, Paul had even called him at the studio where he and Yoko were recording in New York, reportedly hoping to spur some kind of new collaboration. Write a few songs, maybe get John to contribute a bit to the album Paul was about to start with George Martin. Once they got those three into the same studio, who knew what could happen? Paul never did manage to speak with John, though, and if his messages got past Yoko, John never responded. Not directly, anyway.

- Paul McCartney: A Life - Peter Ames Carlin.

In 1984, a straightforward Linda McCartney waits for her husband to leave the room to share her take on John's domestic bliss with reporter Joan Goodman:

LINDA: I was just going to say that 1 think if John had lived, he might still be saying, "Oh, I'm much happier now

PLAYBOY: And you don't believe it?

LINDA: The sad thing is that John and Paul both had problems and they loved each other and, boy, could they have helped each other! If they had only communicated! It frustrates me no end, because I was just some chick from New York when I walked into all of that. God, if I'd known what I know now.... All I could do was sit there watching them play these games...

PLAYBOY: But wasn't it clear that John wanted only to work with Yoko?

LINDA: No. I know that Paul was desperate to write with John again. And I know John was desperate to write... desperate. People thought, Well, he's taking care of Sean, he's a househusband and all that, but he wasn't happy. He couldn't write and it drove him crazy. And Paul could have helped him—easily.

Paul returns.

- Interview to Playboy Magazine, December 1984

It's easy to argue John's reclusive behavior came from a need for privacy and desire to stay away from negative influences. Both good points. Stars of his magnitude inevitably attract parasites.

Nevertheless there seems to be a cause-effect correlation between his avoidance and Yoko's iron control. He wasn't as monastic with Cynthia or May and those were the most prolific years of his life. For all his protests and disappointments, John thrived interacting with others.

After being turned down too many times, most people stopped trying to contact him. He soon found himself outnumbered by employees, psychics and sycophants handpicked by his wife, who had also taken over the business affairs.

On this subject, Harold Seider didn't hold his tongue in interview to Albert Goldman:

Actually, there was no reason why John Lennon should have attended the Apple board meetings; none of the other principals appeared at the meetings because they dealt primarily with the implementation of the settlement agreement and the dissolution of Apple, matters best left in the hands of the lawyers and accountants. What -was surprising about this tirade was the indifference it revealed in Lennon's mind about who represented him in his business affairs. This was a new and potentially dangerous development. Its onset can be associated with the dismissal of Harold Seider in April 1976. Ostensibly Seider was fired because somebody had to take the rap for the Morris Levy fiasco, and Seider felt it was his duty to be the fall guy. Privately, however, he ascribed his dismissal to the machinations of Yoko Ono.

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."

(...)

There was a complete purge of all the Lennons' lawyers and accountants, whom Yoko must have viewed with distrust because they all had been hired on Seider's recommendation.

The next manager of the Lennons' affairs was Michael Tannen, Paul Simon's lawyer, a dynamic personality of the sort who gets involved in his client's life. Seider predicted that Tannen's tenure would be brief because the reticent Lennon would not find Tannen's style of management congenial. Tannen lasted, in fact, less than six months. Even so, in Seider's view, he performed a vital service because "Yoko was using him as an intermediate step in order to arrange complete control. She couldn't go from me to herself immediately. She had to get John conditioned to the idea that nobody was capable of doing the job but her." She also had to interject herself into the management of Lennon's business affairs because these were the heart of the "bank." Hitherto Yoko had never been allowed to meddle in Lennon's business because Seider had stood in her way. "Had she intruded herself overtly," he remarked, "both I and the lawyers would have resigned. She was not the client."

- The Lives of John Lennon - Albert Goldman

When John obtained his green card in 1976, he never returned to his native England. However, his deep pockets were funding annual trips to Japan and Yoko's family visits to New York. Many of those relatives didn't speak English so John's isolation under his own roof must've been staggering. Paul claims John took Japanese classes at Berlitz but there's no evidence whether he continued the studies after his eight week course. It's unlikely.

It was clear that with her new obligations, Yoko had no time for her husband's codependency and libido. She opted for spending as little time with him as possible. With John's new right to leave the American soil without any issues to re-entry, Yoko sent him away to Hong Kong and other distant locations where he didn't know a single person. No doubt a terrifying ordeal for a man divorced from real life. He didn't even how order a taxi.

Considering the Lennons had an army of servants, Sean was reaching nursery school age and Mother wasn't around much, how did John actually spend his time? Well, not baking bread, apparently.

After a visit, Julian paints a not so flattering image of the The Ballad of John and Yoko:

Julian returned home with bleak reports of the eccentric life John and Yoko led in the Dakota building. Yoko ran their business empire from another apartment downstairs, known as Studio One (they owned five in the building). She hardly ever appeared in the family apartment, and often slept in her office, where she had a bed. Meanwhile, Sean was looked after by a nanny, Helen Seaman, Fred's aunt, while John spent much of his time in bed. Julian would lurk outside his room, occasionally plucking up the courage to go in.

John would be sitting in bed with his guitar, the phone, a coffee and the TV on. He liked to watch the news and would shout at the TV, 'That's a load of crap,' when he didn't agree with something. After a while Julian would slip away to play with Sean, He saw no evidence that John was a devoted househusband or Sean's carer. Helen looked after Sean, and there were periods when he saw little of either parent. Far from baking bread or playing with Sean, John seemed to live in his own small world in the bedroom. He had relinquished all power to Yoko, who, he told Julian, 'knows best', and he appeared to have little interest in making music or anything else.

- John, Cynthia Lennon

His Dakota neighbors would tell similar stories of aimlessness and nostalgia:

As the 1970s wore on, the Dakota had evolved into a kind of gilded hideaway for the former Beatle, who spent most of his time alone in his seventh-floor bedroom. Tucked away near the apartment’s foyer, with a curtain of beads acting as a makeshift doorway, his bedroom was perched high above Central Park West. But the view was largely wasted upon him, with the white shutters about his large window invariably closed.

John passed most of his days sitting cross-legged atop a queen-sized bed, with its mattress and box springs situated atop a pair of old church pews. To his mind, “it comforted him to think of how many people have knelt on those pews to pray. They were full of mending, gratitude, and good wishes.” With its sound muted, a giant television screen emitted the flickering images of soap operas. The only sound came from a nearby portable radio tuned to a classical music station. He would jokingly refer to his TV as his “electronic fireplace”. John’s addiction to television was a poorly kept secret among his fellow Dakotans. His neighbour Rex Reed, a popular American film critic, could attest to that. After Reed signed a petition in support of John’s immigration fight, the Beatle had thanked him with a subscription to TV Guide. “That was his bible,” Reed later recalled. “All he did was lie around stoned watching television.”

John Lennon 1980 - Kenneth Womack

David Marlowe, a novelist (Yearbook), can look from his eighth-floor living-room window down into the Lennons’ seventh-floor kitchen in the Dakota. Sometimes he sees John Lennon sitting in the kitchen, alone, strumming his guitar. If the window is open, faint music drifts up. The old Beatles songs, with their wild bursts of melody, which once seemed so exuberantly cheerful (“Yeah, yeah, yeah”), and which were about love as much as anything, now sound sad from David Marlowe’s window listening-point.

- Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address - Stephen Birmingham

If other people's accounts don't come across as credible enough, one only has to look at John's few home demos of the period. The music doesn't match the prideful tone he would often take when defending his choices.

Mirror Mirror (On The Wall) suggests a disintegrating sense of self. The theme wasn't new in his body of work. In fact, it went back to I'm A Loser and Nowhere Man:

Sometimes I look in the mirror

Is nobody there?

But I just keep on staring and staring

Can it be?

And if I look in the mirror

And nobody´s there

But I just keep on staring, and staring

Is it me?

In Now and Then, his fear of abandonment, damsel in distress complex and penchant for bouts of remorse. It doesn't scream healthy relationship:

I know it's true, it's all because of you

And if I make it through, it's all because of you

And now and then, if we must start again

Well, we will know for sure that I love you

I don't want to lose you - oh no, no, no

Lose you or abuse you - oh no, no, no, sweet darlin'

But if you have to go away

If you have to go

Now and then, I miss you

Oh now and then, I want it to return to me

I know return to me

Real Life presents John's grim concept of what "real life" at the time meant: running back to bed in existential dread. It's Good Morning Good Morning's bleaker sister:

Woke up this morning blues around my head

No need to ask the reason why

Went to the kitchen and I ran back to my bed

Something funny in the sky

Why must we be alone

It's real life

The scenario described by Fred Seaman, the man hired by Yoko to be John's personal assistant wasn't much brighter. The job description:

To "keep John happy" by buying whatever he asked me to get and by generally keeping him company when he was lonely or bored. If he made any unusual requests or behaved strangely, I was to bring it to her attention.

(...)

In a sense, Yoko hired me as a go-between and to give John some distraction so that he wouldn't bother her. If he wanted something, he could ask me to get it for him. If he had something on his mind, he could say it to me. If he got mad, he could get mad at me. It did not take me long to see that John and Yoko's relationship was anything but the mythical romance they had fashioned for the media.

- The Last Days of John Lennon - Frederic Seaman

With unprecedented access to life inside the Dakota, Seaman's recollections go in line with the speculation about John's remoteness and Yoko's gatekeeping:

She (Yoko) also warned me that all kinds of people would try to contact John, and she made it clear that I was never to put anybody through to him without her permission. She specifically cautioned me about taking calls from John's teenage son Julian, or the boy's mother Cynthia, as well as from Paul McCartney and any of the ex-Beatles.

(...)

John rarely saw anyone outside the family and staff and he took virtually no phone calls, except over the intercom. When he did use the phone, it was always with the conviction the FBI was listening. Thus, his insulation from the outside world seemed nearly complete.

- The Last Days of John Lennon - Frederic Seaman

Seaman also drew attention to Yoko's suspicious dynamics with Sam Green and one Sam Havadtoy, an interior decorator. Havadtoy had been on a relationship with hairstylist Luciano Sparacino before they became involved. For some reason, Yoko used to discuss her dead husband's sexuality with Jann and Jane Wenner:

The Wenners moved to the West Side of Manhattan in 1987, right around the corner from Ono, and became frequent dinner companions. They bonded over the subject that Lennon had shrewdly tweaked Wenner about in the 1980 interview: interior decorating. After Lennon’s death, Ono became lovers with the couple’s personal decorator, Sam Havadtoy, a Hungarian émigré who met John and Yoko when they were shopping for Egyptian furniture in a shop he ran with his partner on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Havadtoy had a male lover before Ono, and he would have male lovers after her, but he became her companion for twenty years. The Wenners hired Havadtoy to decorate their new townhouse. Havadtoy said Wenner and Ono had a lot in common. "They're both crazy people" he said.

Havadtoy became part of the Wenners’ lives, a sidekick to Jane as she bought expensive carpets and beds for every room. “Jane had a constant desire to have a bed everywhere, a daybed, a chaise,” said Havadtoy, “and Jann didn’t take to that so freely.” Wenner would get mad when Havadtoy encouraged Jane to spend too much on carpets, but over dinner the Wenners learned the secrets of the Beatles kingdom from Ono, who would often suggest to Wenner that John Lennon was gay. “She’s always hinted that there was some gay component to John,” said Wenner, “but in a vague or generalized way, like, ‘Isn’t everybody gay?’ Or, ‘I always told John he was gay.’ ” (She also told McCartney this theory after Lennon died, which he didn’t believe.)

- Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine - Joe Hagan

The rumor is that Havadtoy moved in the same week John was killed. There must be some true to it, considering he stayed for the next two decades and Yoko never ceased her persecution of Seaman.

Seaman has serious faults but Yoko must have reasons to want this man as quiet as possible.

With that in mind, now on to a few comments about Double Fantasy itself. According to Yoko, the premise is a conversation between a couple. The concept was pushed by her and in fact, one of the reasons John signed with David Geffen was because he wasn't resistant to the idea. Other labels were skeptical about the romantic angle of the now famous cover photograph, for example:

Later, after they sensed some resistance from their distributor about using a photo of the couple lost in a kiss, they’d heard enough. “That’s when we decided we were gonna do it, because both of us were rebellious. John said, ‘From now on, we’ll only take photos of you and me looking at each other.’”

- John Lennon 1980, Kenneth Womack

It sounds like romance when you have to say it.

I wonder if the people who reviewed the album even listened to it. By the song titles alone you could find trouble in paradise. I suppose they must've been too influenced by the publicity to notice the tension.

The takeaway of John's side is I'm Losing You while Yoko's is literally I'm Moving On. If that's a dialogue, what is the audience to understand? Of course feelings change and evolve all the time but with everything else going on around John and Yoko it felt like the end of the line. That's when the gossip starts.

Even Watching The Wheels, one of John's most passionate defenses of the househusband period, has lines like "I'm just sitting here doing time" and some nonsense about being happy "watching shadows on the wall".

Being something of a delusional contrarian myself, I can recognize the overcompensation from miles away. Such personalities hate admitting that others might know what's best for them, especially if it's some conventional truth.

And if hard times were over for Yoko Ono, who's to say that included John Lennon? Many people believe her decision was on hold until the end of the Double Fantasy run. I agree with that.

As John recognized, the world seemed ready for her sound in the 1980s. A track like Every Man Has A Woman Who Loves Him is as good as anything else in the period and in fact many of the musicians influenced by Yoko are Gen Xers.

If she could make it alone, why would she stay? Especially if Havadtoy was already on the scene? As the manager of the Lennon fortune and mother of his child, she would be favored in every aspect of a divorce. It'd be a lucrative settlement and this is not someone who runs away from profit.

Ultimately destiny made the choice for her.

With all that being said, Double Fantasy is an album I really enjoy. The good aspects of it really shine through in the stripped down version, such as John's great lyrics and singing. It was a step towards a new direction. I'm just mystified by his choice of Jack Douglas. Maybe it's because I loathe the 80s but his production is so cheesy and dated.

On a final note, I don't recommend letting cynicism get in your way of enjoying things. Let's just say raising some questions is never a bad thing.

#john lennon #yoko ono #the lost weekend

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