"I figured that my job was done, and no one else would need my pictures," said Gruen. "But then, I ran into one of the members of Elephant's Memory, and he said they'd been trying to contact me because I had the only pictures of them together with John and Yoko in the studio, and they wanted to see them. He brought me over to [the Lennons'] Bank Street apartment and that was the first time we really got to talk. I spent the afternoon there, talking and showing them my other pictures. And we just formed a relationship. At the end of that meeting, Yoko told me to start coming to the studio so I could take pictures of them. She said she wanted me to be involved with them. And so that's what I did."
The Lennons obviously liked Gruen's work but, more important, he had earned their trust. He said he would drop off the pictures from the Apollo, and he did. He never chased after the Lennons in an attempt to get more work, and he never tried to contact them after the Elephant's Memory shoot. He had proved himself without really trying. He was in.
Elliot Mintz's relationship with John and Yoko began in a similar fashion. A veteran West Coast public relations executive, Mintz had a side job in the early seventies hosting a nighttime radio show on KLOS-FM, the ABC affiliate station in Los Angeles. In 1971, he interviewed Yoko by phone, and then sent her the tape. "John apparently heard it and liked it," recalled Mintz. "Yoko then suggested that he, too, should do a phone interview with me, and he did it. A few days later, he called me to say that he was pleased with the way the interview went. He just liked the texture of it. Thus we began a telephonic friendship, John, Yoko, and myself, and we'd all speak virtually every day or every night for months. I'm an insomniac. I don't sleep. I'm up until 4 A.M., Pacific Time. That was their wake-up time in New York. So we would talk all the time."
By the spring of 1972, one of the subjects that monopolized these late-night talks was Lennon's desire to see America. And in this regard, he was really on even footing with his wife. Yoko might have thought of herself as a New Yorker by virtue of her fifteen years there, but when it came to the rest of the country, she was as much of a tourist as her husband.
"John had seen the United States only from an airplane, as a Beatle," said Mintz. "And Yoko had never seen the United States, outside of New York. So they got into this old white Nash Rambler, with a driver, and they drove from New York to Los Angeles, stopping off along the way to sleep, to go to all-night diners and twenty-four-hour coffee shops. Imagine yourself in 1972 sitting in an all-night coffee shop in Nevada and John and Yoko walk in. Well, as they got closer to Los Angeles, they took a wrong turn on the freeway and wound up in a field near Santa Barbara. And they called me and said they would like to meet me. Of course, I knew what they looked like. But they had never seen me. I drove up to Santa Barbara, found the white Rambler, got into the car, and we hugged. That's how we met."
Mintz's long phone calls with the Lennons continued unabated after the couple returned to New York. He talked them through their move from Bank Street to the Dakota, the landmark apartment complex on the corner of West Seventy-second Street and Central Park West. And he came to New York often to be with them for most special occasions, including the birth of their son, Sean, in 1975, and most of the traditional holidays. In the process, Mintz, like Gruen, proved to be someone the Lennons could trust.
"From the time that I met them to the time that he ran out of time, I spent most of my Thanksgivings, Christmases, and New Year's Eves with them," said Mintz. "I live alone in Los Angeles. I've never been married and I have no children. They were my extended family. But I want to make one thing clear: I never worked for John. There's probably been a misconception about that over the years. But no dollars ever traded hands."
The Lennons used some of the money they never gave Mintz to eventually purchase five apartments in the Dakota, two for actual living and three smaller spaces for employees and storage. The highlights of their eight years together at the Dakota have been well-documented: In the fall of 1973, John and Yoko separated. He went to Los Angeles with their secretary, May Pang, while Yoko remained in New York by herself. John said at the time that Yoko kicked him out. She said the separation was inevitable, and added that it might actually do him some good.
Fifteen months later, in January 1975, John returned to New York, reunited with Yoko, and got her pregnant, in that order. The couple's only child together, Sean Taro Ono Lennon, was born at New York Hospital on October 9, the very same day that his father turned thirty-five. By the time Sean was one, John Lennon was experiencing a new kind of freedom. For the first time since becoming a Beatle, he had no recording contract, having been dropped by his label, EMI-Capitol. Also during that year, he was finally awarded a green card and the promise of possible U.S. citizenship. And, most important, he had this one-year-old baby whom he desperately wanted to be with night and day.
With no professional commitments hanging over his head, and money issues nonexistent, Lennon retired from show business, beginning what Mintz described as "John's cocooning period."
"Between '75 and '80, he was with Sean every day," said Mintz. "And all those stories you've read about Yoko taking care of business downstairs and John being the house husband, in spite of anything anyone's ever said to the contrary, those stories were all true." Many writers over the years have attempted to debunk the image of Lennon at home doing the chores, most notably Albert Goldman in his book The Lives of John Lennon. Goldman always asserted that Lennon made up this "big lie" about his housebound lifestyle to reinforce the validity of his wife's business skills in hopes that the public would take her more seriously.
For his part, Lennon remained totally consistent about the quieter life he was leading after Sean's birth. "I've been baking bread and looking after the baby" was how Lennon began his now-historic 1980 Playboy interview with writer David Sheff. Stunned by Lennon's characterization of himself during the preceding few years, Sheff asked whether it was possible that Yoko had been controlling him. The question was enough to send Lennon into a rage.
"If you think I'm being controlled like a dog on a leash because I do things with her," Lennon said, "then screw you! Because-fuck you brother and sister, you don't know what's happening!" Lennon went on to say that his wife was the teacher "and I'm the pupil. . . . She's taught me everything I fucking know. . . . She was there . . . when I was the 'Nowhere Man.'"
According to Mintz, Lennon's version of how he and Yoko led their lives in the late 1970s "is 100 percent accurate." "That's what he did," said Mintz. "He cocooned. I don't think that reading Rolling Stone was so important during those years, and I don't think he paid that much attention to trends in music.
"But all during this so-called silent period, John remained incredibly interested in current events and politics," said Mintz. "He read the papers every day, and he used to call me to watch the evening news, which he saw in New York three hours ahead of me. He would tell me things to look for. He watched a lot of television, nonfiction television, primarily the news. He would have had a field day with all the cable talk shows today. He wouldn't have slept. He would have been glued to Fox and CNN. That's all he would be doing, that and sending e-mails, which hadn't been invented yet.
"But he was very up on the politics of the time, and, of course, John's political persuasions are extremely well known, so you can imagine his overall feelings about the emerging Reagan administration and the conservatism in the country," said Mintz. "And it has also been well documented that John continued to be under constant FBI surveillance, which he always viewed as a force with which to be reckoned. John and Yoko never told anybody how to vote. And John never voted because he wasn't a citizen. So he had no political party affiliation. He basically felt that both parties were about the same. Having said that, I do think that the coming emergence of Reaganism did send a chill up his spine. Not because of Ronald Reagan himself, but because John perceived that the country was moving in a direction that was the antithesis of the things he embraced in his life, like 'Give Peace a Chance' and the point of view expressed in 'Imagine.' If Ronald Reagan had read the lyrics to 'Imagine,' he probably would have recoiled in horror."
It was one of the few times in Lennon's life, according to Yoko, that he didn't purposely go out and make waves. "You must understand," she said, "we had a very difficult time with immigration. But when John finally got his green card, he thought, well, he has a son, he has his green card. Maybe this is not the time to be too dangerous." Then came the summer of 1980. Against the political backdrop of fifty-two Americans still being held hostage in Iran, which greatly diminished the chances of Jimmy Carter's reelection bid and made Reagan look more and more like the next president of the United States, Lennon traveled with a five-man crew to Bermuda on his yacht, Isis. His intention was to rent a house on the island and simply while away his time swimming and sailing. But something else happened on Bermuda, and it turned out to be a burst of creative energy that saw him writing more than a dozen songs in three weeks.
He knew Yoko also had been writing songs in New York, and they would spend days on the phone singing their latest compositions to each other. It was clear to both of them that they would start recording a new album as soon he got back.
"He was so excited on the phone," recalled Yoko. "He said, 'I wrote two songs.'
"And I said, 'I have two songs. Let's make an EP.'
"And then the next day, he said, 'Now I have two more.' "And I said, 'Well, maybe now it should be an album.' That's how it started. We decided to work on a theme, and he was very excited about that. He just kept thanking me and thanking me."
On Tuesday, August 5, John and Yoko entered the Hit Factory, on West Fifty-fourth Street in New York, to begin recording the album, Double Fantasy. Producer Jack Douglas was at the controls, and photographer Bob Gruen was given almost free reign to document the sessions with candid pictures.
"I visited the studio on and off from late summer through the end of the backing track sessions," said Gruen. "I was there a number of times while they recorded. We really had no set appointments. I just did things as the situation came up. John was extremely positive about the music he was making, and excited to be back in the studio. He was coming from a position of real strength in his life. He had spent five years out of the limelight, and he had taken time to raise his son and learn about parenting and about living.
"The album was to be about the relationship between a man and a woman," said Gruen. "And in that regard it was very much a John and Yoko project, not just John Lennon. A track of his would follow a track of hers, and then they'd stop to talk about their feelings and deal with the relationship. To me, he appeared so grounded."
"I had been in a hundred recording studios with different artists, and I'd been with John in various studios, as well," said Mintz. "The recording of Double Fantasy was unique because in many ways it was a metaphor for the way John's life was coming to completion. All these recording studios-the Hit Factory, where John and Yoko recorded the album, or the Record Plant, where it was mixed-have closed-circuit cameras at the front door. They have this so an engineer can see who is ringing the buzzer. A lot of sessions sometimes go on into the middle of the night. The studio may not be in the best neighborhood. So they need these cameras for security reasons. One of the things I remember about the Double Fantasy sessions was John and Yoko pinning a large photograph of Sean to the face of the TV monitor above the recording console. You couldn't see who was outside, but for John and Yoko it was more important to see Sean staring down at the console.
