_________________
The Beatles – No Reply
The Beatles at the Morecambe & Wise Show – 02/12/63
The Beatles “Strawberry Fields Forever” (Music Video 1967)
Beatles – “Don’t Let Me Down” (1969) HQ
W.C. Fields: Behind The Laughter (Part 2/2)
Who are the alcoholics on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Album cover? James Joyce, W.C. Fields, and Tony Curtis are three we can start off with. Ronald Fields, W.C.Fields’ grandson, in the above video clip at the 17:40 noted that his grandfather said, “I only have one regret. I wonder what it would have been like without alcohol.” Next we have to think about four other people who died prematurely in part because of alcohol and they were Lenny Bruce, Edgar Allan Poe, Dylan Thomas, and Marilyn Monroe.
A report in The New York Times said that the number of suicides in New York a week after MARILYN MONROE’S death hit a record high of 12 in one day. One suicide victim left a note saying, “If the most wonderful, beautiful thing in the world has nothing to live for, then neither must I.”
Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggioCredit: Reuters/The Estate of John Vachon/Dover Publications
________
Lenny Bruce on Stg. Pepper’s cover:
Wikipedia observed:
On August 3, 1966, a bearded Lenny Bruce was found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home at 8825 W. Hollywood Blvd.[47] The official photo, taken at the scene, showed Bruce lying naked on the floor, a syringe and burned bottle cap nearby, along with various other narcotics paraphernalia.
On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents.
Dylan Thomas liked to boast about his drinking and said: “An alcoholic is someone you don’t like, who drinks as much as you do.” Thomas’ health rapidly began to deteriorate as a result of his drinking; he was warned by his doctor to give up alcohol but he carried on regardless.
James Joyce lived in Dublin for many years, binge drinking the whole time. His drinking episodes occasionally caused fights in the local pubs.
Another Sgt. Pepper’s face passes away
[Posted by Dave Haber on Thursday, 09/30/10 2:06 pm] [Full Blog] [Tweet] [Facebook]
Actor and Hollywood legend Tony Curtis has passed away. He was among the actors and famous people that the Beatles admired that were pictured on the cover of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album in 1967.
Curtis, himself, was a big Beatles fan. In March, 2009, Tony Curtis visited Las Vegas to sign autographs for fans to celebrate the release of his book, “American Prince – A Memoir.” Curtis showed up to the event wearing a t-shirt bearing the picture of the Sgt. Pepper’s cover in which he appears.
Tony Curtis in 2009
Known for comedic roles like Some Like it Hot and serious movies like Spartacus, Curtis died on Wednesday of cardiac arrest in his Nevada home. He was 85.
EXCERPT FROM ‘SOME LIKE IT HOT”
INSIGNIFICANCE Trailer (1985) – The Criterion Collection
TONY CURTIS: “38 YEARS… GONE LIKE THAT.”
by Roger Ebert
May 14, 1985
Cannes, France – “How’s the Cannes Film Festival? I’ll tell you one thing, pal. It’s a whole lot better than a kick in the ass. I got my ticket paid for, I’m staying in a first-class hotel, I’m wearing expensive boa-constrictor cowboy boots, and I’m not drinking and I’m not taking drugs. How could life be better?”
Tony Curtis was in an expansive mood. He’s a naturally exuberant man, but this time he seemed happier and a little calmer than the last time I caught him at Cannes — the time he interrupted our interview to lean out the window and try to pick up a girl who was walking in front of his hotel.
“You know how hard it is to get boa-constrictor boots? One guy holds down the snake, and the other two guys pull off his boots.” Curtis is going to be 60 on his next birthday, June 6. He has made at least 140 movies. He has been a famous movie star for 38 years, and there is only one place where he wants to set the record straight.
“I never said Yonder lies dah castle of my faddah. That line has become part of the folklore. You go to see the movie, listen for yourself. What I said was, clear as day, father. See, I was born Bernie Schwartz. I’m a Hungarian Jew from Brooklyn. So they thought I had to pronounce it faddah, because it fit the stereotype. Lawrence Olivier was in the same picture, but nobody thinks he ever mispronounced anything in his whole life.”
It was a rainy Saturday at the Cannes festival, and we were sitting in a little lounge hidden off the lobby of the Carlton Hotel. A few hours ago they’d held the press screening for Curtis’s new movie, “Insignificance,” a truly odd tragicomedy by Nicholas Roeg, about a long night spent together byMarilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Sen. Joe McCarthy.
Curtis played McCarthy as a boozy charmer who kicks the hooker out of his bed so he can go deliver an ultimatum to Einstein: Talk before the Senate loyalty committee, or else. When he gets to Einstein’s hotel room, he finds Monroe in the professor’s bed, and DiMaggio pounding on the door. None of the movie’s characters are referred to by name, but there is no doubt who they’re meant to be.
Curtis, of course, co-starred with Monroe in perhaps her best movie, “Some Like It Hot.” In “Insignificance,” the blond sex symbol is played by Theresa Russell, and at the press conference after the screening, Curtis was asked if it brought back any memories when he walked on the set and saw her blond wig and white-pleated dress.
“Naw, I never was in drag in a blond wig or a white dress,” Curtis joked. “In that picture, I was a brunet.”
Later, though, he told me it did seem a little strange to be playing opposite a Marilyn figure.
“Theresa doesn’t look like Marilyn to me, but I’d catch a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye, and it would bring back so many memories. You see, when we were making that picture, she was suffering from the same disease that I have — alcoholism and drug addiction. Only we didn’t know it. You deny you have a problem. Everybody tries to work around it.
“The director, Billy Wilder, told Jack Lemmon and me that Marilyn might go 40 takes before she got something right, but when she got it right, that would be the take he would use — so we better have our acts together, and not have our fingers up our noses.
“I remember one day, Marilyn was drinking champagne, and by 5:30 in the afternoon she couldn’t work anymore. And I saw Arthur Miller, who was then her husband, drive onto the set in a limousine and take her arm and just yank her into the car, like she was a drunk, which of course she was, except that not Miller or nobody else thought of it as a disease, and they just treated her like a drunk, and she never got the help she needed.”
But you finally did get help?
“Jeez, it took me a long time. I’m in recovery now. I’m like a pregnant woman — in the recovery room. Drugs and booze were a terrible ordeal for me for years, and I was in mid-life before I realized it. I was losing control, I was powerless over the stuff, my life was unmanageable, my personality would change in weird ways, I finally knew something was very wrong. I was unable to work. I was difficult for me to work with, forget about anybody else. I had been denying it. Monroe had the line in ‘Some Like It Hot,’ She said it to me: ‘I can quit anytime I want to, only I don’t want to.’
“As for all the publicity about how I went into Betty Ford Center, that’s the tail wagging the dog. The center isn’t the big thing. It’s admitting you got a problem, pal, and you need help. Whether it’s Betty Ford or your local AA meeting down the street, what difference does it make? Today I don’t have to hide in the closet. The only treatment for substance abuse is complete abstinence, and to talk about it, like in AA. I’m gonna be 60 soon, and I’ve learned so much, I feel like I spent 59 years of my life between my 59th and 60th birthdays.
Curtis said he went to Hungary right before he came to Cannes, to visit the village where his father was born.
“I wanted to look on the same hills his eyes looked on. I’m trying to figure out this thing called life. I’m trying to understand what happened to me. Let me tell you a story, sort of a parable. One day in 1948 I went to Hollywood. My name was Bernie Schwartz. I signed a contract at Universal, and I bought a house in the hills. It had a swimming pool. Unheated, but it had water in it. One night I came home late, I jumped in the pool, I swam a few laps, I got out, I dried myself off, I put on my clothes, and I walked directly into this room and sat down and started to talk to you. Do you see what I’m saying? Thirty-eight years, I don’t know where they went. Gone like that.”
He shook his head, slowly. “Yesterday, I jumped in that pool,” he said. “Jeez, the water was cold.”
______________________________
Both Paul McCartney and John Lennon had their dark times when they were almost captured by alcoholism after the break up of the Beatles. At the beginning of the video below Paul McCartney noted:
It really hit me. Very insecure, very paranoid, very out of work, very useless and I was going crazy. I wouldn’t get up in the morning and when I did get up I wouldn’t shave or bother with anything and I would reach for the whisky. I was going downhill. I would read the newspaper and it would say, “McCartney broke up the Beatles!!” That would send me off on another bout. If I was doing it on my own, I am not sure if I would have got out of it, but very luckily Linda was there and she said, “You don’t need to do this and there is a way you can do your music.” She started to steer me in a good direction, and I started to feel much better about myself.
Paul McCartney (3/9) – Wingspan
LennoNYC
Just like Paul who fell into the liquor trap, John Lennon also had his bout with liquor (described in above video, LENNONYC, starting at 40 min mark) but it seems that John’s was for a longer period of time. At the 53 min mark in the above video, LENNONYC, the photographer Bob Gruen said of Lennon’s time in Los Angeles, “You don’t get drunk every night if you are happy. You don’t take drugs if you are happy.” In the autumn of 1973 John had what he called his lost weekend which lasted 14 months. In the article, “When Harry met… John, Paul, George and Ringo: The American Beatle’s 18-month ‘lost weekend’ with Lennon,” by ALYN SHIPTON, August 3, 2013, we read these words:
(Harry) Nilsson was back in Los Angeles by the time of John Lennon’s arrival in the city in the autumn of 1973.
Ever since their time together at Lennon’s home, there had been a strong bond of friendship between the two of them.
However, unlike the camaraderie he enjoyed with Ringo, Nilsson always slightly hero-worshipped Lennon, and there was a shared love of the outrageous. This could, and often did, prove to be a destructive force.
Lennon was at a crossroads. His album MIND GAMES would be released in October to indifferent reviews, and in June he had split from Yoko. He and Ono’s former personal assistant, May Pang, eloped to the West Coast, where Lennon planned to make an album of rock classics, to be produced by Phil Spector.
Lennon’s drinking was under control in New York, but in Los Angeles, away from Yoko, it increased dramatically as he began socialising with Nilsson.
As she watched Lennon match Nilsson’s intake of brandy and cocaine, May Pang felt powerless: ‘(Nilsson) had charm. We loved him. But he went to extremes.’
The Beatles All You Need Is Love Take 58
Published on Dec 22, 2012
Title: All You Need Is Love – Take 58. This song was recorded between June 14 – 26. One of two remixes made on June 21 was given to the BBC to be used on the June 25 “Our World” TV special.
Harry Nilsson – Everybody’s Talkin’ (1969)
Left to right: John Lennon, Anne Murray, Harry Nilsson, Alice Cooper, Micky Dolenz.
When Harry met… John, Paul, George and Ringo: The American Beatle’s 18-month ‘lost weekend’ with Lennon
By ALYN SHIPTON
PUBLISHED: 16:00 EST, 3 August 2013 | UPDATED: 16:27 EST, 3 August 2013
Mike Nesmith & John Lennon
Harry Nilsson – Without You 1972 (HD)
HARRY NILSSON Pussy Cats Mini-Documentary JOHN LENNON NSFW
Epic brandy binges. Guns in the studio. The famous ‘Lost Weekend’. How Harry Nilsson, the hellraising singer of Without You, befriended and bewitched the Fab Four – and drove himself into an early grave
One long party: During the infamous ‘lost weekend’ Harry Nilsson with John Lennon and May Pang. Nilsson always slightly hero-worshipped Lennon, and there was a shared love of the outrageous
Somewhere between three and four o’clock on a Monday morning in April 1968, the telephone rang in the little office at RCA Records in Los Angeles where an obscure singer-songwriter named Harry Nilsson was keeping his usual nocturnal hours.
‘I was half asleep,’ Nilsson recalled. ‘A voice says: “Hello, Harry. This is John. Man you’re too f***ing much, you’re just great. We’ve got to get together and do something.”
‘I said, “Who is this?”
‘“John Lennon.”
‘I said: “Yeah, right, who is this?”
‘“It’s John Lennon. I’m just trying to say you’re fantastic. Have a good night’s sleep. Speak to you soon. Goodbye.”
‘I thought, “Was that a dream?”’ Not a dream, but the start of an association that would change Nilsson’s life.
The year before, Nilsson recorded The Beatles’ You Can’t Do That, cleverly using quotes from 14 other Beatles songs.
That had led to an invitation to a party at George Harrison’s rented house in the Hollywood Hills.
Harry recalled that the Beatle, ‘in a white windblown robe with a beard and long hair, looking like Christ with a camcorder’, had listened to his songs and been ‘very complimentary’.
John Lennon – Woman
Nilsson was described as ‘the finest white male singer on the planet’, and was an accomplished songwriter who happened to have huge hits with two songs he did not write: Everybody’s Talkin’ and Without You
Harrison took Nilsson’s demos away and played them to the other Beatles, who were now calling Harry in the middle of the night.
The Monday after Lennon’s call, Paul McCartney rang. ‘Hello, Harry. Yeah, this is Paul. Just wanted to say you’re great, man! John gave me the album. It’s great; you’re terrific. Look forward to seeing you.’
The next Monday, Nilsson dressed and waited for a four o’clock call from Ringo. It didn’t come. But on May 14, Lennon and McCartney appeared at a press conference in New York.
Asked to name their favourite American artist, Lennon replied ‘Nilsson’. The two gave the same response when asked their favourite group.
Later that day, when a journalist wondered what they thought about American music, Lennon replied, ‘Nilsson! Nilsson for president!’
A unique relationship would form between Nilsson and The Beatles. He would write a song for McCartney, make films and party through the 1970s with Ringo Starr, and record and raise hell with Lennon in the notorious 18-month ‘lost weekend’ period in 1973 and 1974, when John left Yoko Ono for a wild life in Los Angeles.
There was, it should be said, much more to Nilsson than his Beatles associations.
He was described by his producer Richard Perry as ‘the finest white male singer on the planet’, and was an accomplished songwriter who happened to have huge hits with two songs he did not write: Everybody’s Talkin’ and Without You.
Not long after Lennon and McCartney returned from New York, Derek Taylor, The Beatles’ press officer at Apple, made a call to Harry.
‘Derek says: “The lads, the boys, the Fabs would like you to come over and join them at a session,”’ Nilsson remembered. ‘“They’re recording at Abbey Road. They’re dying to see you.”’
Nilsson with Ringo Starr and Lynsey de Paul. ‘When he got to make records with John Lennon and be friends with Ringo Starr, his life was complete,’ said legendary songwriter Jimmy Webb
John Lennon – Watching the Wheels
Within a few days, Nilsson was sitting on a plane crossing the Atlantic.
Arriving at Heathrow, he found that Ringo had kindly left his Daimler limousine at the airport for him.
Suddenly famous, having been endorsed by the world’s biggest band, Nilsson went straight to a reception for his own record, where the other three Beatles were the stars of a guest list that included everybody who was anybody in swinging London.
That afternoon, another limo arrived to take Harry out to Lennon’s home in the Surrey commuter belt.
Nilsson was greeted warmly by Lennon, and a single look between them was the start of a lifelong friendship.
‘We spent the entire night talking until dawn,’ said Nilsson.
‘Yoko ended up like a kitten at John’s feet, curled up. And John and I are on about marriage, life, death, divorce, women. And I’m thinking, “This is it! This is truthful. This is good. This is honest. This is exciting. It’s inspirational.”’
Lennon gave Nilsson an Indian gold braided jacket with fur trim lining he had worn in Magical Mystery Tour.
The following day McCartney announced he was coming over to Nilsson’s hotel, and he ran through rough versions of several of his newly written songs.
Nilsson sent down for a bottle or two of the best wine on the hotel’s room service list, and they carried on singing songs for one another into the small hours, until there was a thunderous banging on the door from the occupants of the room next door: ‘What the hell do you people think you’re doing? Don’t you know some people work for a living? Some people have to get up in the morning!’
Nilsson calmly introduced them to his visitors, and Paul gently apologised. The neighbours were impressed to find that the disturbance had been created by so famous a guest and made no further complaints. The evening ended with McCartney driving Nilsson around London in his Aston Martin.
It laid the groundwork for future collaborations between Nilsson and all four members of the group.
The song Everybody’s Talkin’ had made Nilsson a star in his own right by the time his friendship with Ringo – soon to be one of the cornerstones of Nilsson’s life – blossomed in the early 1970s.
‘Ringo and I spent a thousand hours laughing,’ said Nilsson.
Lennon and Nilsson are thrown out of the Troubador in LA on March 13, 1974, for heckling
Ringo, often sporting mirrored sunglasses that disguised the effects of the night before, was at the heart of a social set that enjoyed late nights, exclusive bars, nightclubs and brandy.
Along with Nilsson and Ringo, there would be Marc Bolan of T Rex, Keith Moon, and Graham Chapman of Monty Python.
When in London, they would meet in the afternoon, drinking brandy and swapping yarns, each new arrival dropping in with the catchphrase: ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything?’
‘We would drink until 9pm,’ Nilsson recalled. ‘That’s six hours of brandy. Then between 9 and 10, we would usually end up at Tramp, the most uproarious, exclusive disco-restaurant in the world.
‘Royalty, movie stars, world champions all frequented the place. It was a ride, meeting luminaries and having blow-outs every night.’
Nilsson was back in Los Angeles by the time of John Lennon’s arrival in the city in the autumn of 1973.
Ever since their time together at Lennon’s home, there had been a strong bond of friendship between the two of them.
However, unlike the camaraderie he enjoyed with Ringo, Nilsson always slightly hero-worshipped Lennon, and there was a shared love of the outrageous. This could, and often did, prove to be a destructive force.
Lennon was at a crossroads. His album Mind Games would be released in October to indifferent reviews, and in June he had split from Yoko. He and Ono’s former personal assistant, May Pang, eloped to the West Coast, where Lennon planned to make an album of rock classics, to be produced by Phil Spector.
Lennon’s drinking was under control in New York, but in Los Angeles, away from Yoko, it increased dramatically as he began socialising with Nilsson.
As she watched Lennon match Nilsson’s intake of brandy and cocaine, May Pang felt powerless: ‘(Nilsson) had charm. We loved him. But he went to extremes.’
Nilsson and Micky Dolenz at the Rainbow
According to Spector, Nilsson was a hindrance to the sessions, and one of his more extreme pranks involved suggesting holding up a 7-Eleven store.Spector was no less outrageous.
He started arriving at the studio dressed up in various costumes, first as a doctor, then a karate instructor, and finally a cowboy, complete with loaded revolver.
Trying to assert his authority, Spector fired the gun into the air.
Covering his ears, Lennon quipped, ‘Listen Phil, if you’re going to kill me, kill me. But don’t f*** with me ears – I need ’em.’
The sessions broke down, leaving Lennon to spend more time with Nilsson, who introduced him to all his nocturnal haunts.
These included the Rainbow Bar and Grill in Hollywood, where the upstairs room still has a plaque on the wall commemorating their late-night drinking club, ‘the Hollywood Vampires’, which included Micky Dolenz of The Monkees, Keith Moon and Alice Cooper.
On March 13, 1974, Nilsson took his friend to see comedians the Smothers Brothers at the Troubadour club. Lennon proceeded to get seriously drunk on Brandy Alexanders.
The press the next day reported: ‘Customers in the jammed nightclub complained Lennon made sarcastic comments and shouted obscenities during the show.
Said the Smothers’ manager, Ken Fritz: ‘I went over and asked Harry to try to shut up Lennon. Harry said: “I’m trying – don’t blame me!”
‘When Lennon continued, I told him to keep quiet. He swung and hit me in the jaw.’
The bouncers had Lennon out in seconds.
Photographer Brenda Mary Perkins tried to snap him, but the enraged Lennon took a swing and his fist allegedly hit her right eye.
The Nixon administration had tried to have Lennon returned to Britain because of an ancient drug charge. When Perkins filed charges at the sheriff’s office, a Nilsson cover-up and charm campaign quelled an investigation that could have got Lennon deported.
Lennon and Nilsson agreed they had to do something more positive than going out on wild benders. John announced his intention of producing an album for Nilsson, and they decided they and the musicians should rent a beach house close to Santa Monica.
The sessions yielded the disappointing Pussy Cats, but were notable for a rare reunion of the principal Beatles.
Round midnight on the first night, McCartney appeared with Stevie Wonder. Lennon was passing cocaine around, and his offer of a ‘toot’ to Stevie gave the subsequent bootleg album its title: A Toot And A Snore In ’74. It was the last time the two ex-Beatles would ever play together in a studio.
On December 8, 1980, Nilsson was in the studio when he heard Lennon had been shot – it brought his professional life to a complete stop.
He would never make another completed studio album of his own. But by the early 1990s, his weight, his drinking, and the years of cocaine intake had taken a serious toll on his wellbeing.
A business venture resulted in bankruptcy, and Ringo had to step in to provide Harry and his family with a house and spending money. Beset by ill health, Nilsson died on January 15, 1994, aged 52.
In most obituaries, Nilsson’s career was summed up by his two Grammy-winning records, with the suggestion that the rest was an inexorable downturn into self-destruction.
Nilsson seemed to agree: ‘Being relegated to Everybody’s Talkin’ and Without You ain’t exactly what I set out to do.’
‘When he got to make records with John Lennon and be friends with Ringo Starr, his life was complete,’ said close friend and legendary songwriter Jimmy Webb.
‘That’s all he ever wanted. He wanted to know those people, to be admired by them. Everything else was the small print.’
From ‘Nilsson’ by Alyn Shipton, published by OUP USA, £18.99.
To order at a special price of £14.99 with free p&p, please call the Mail Book Shop on 0844 472 4157 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk
John Lennon stand by me
BACKGROUND PHOTO BOMB:
Friday, May 3rd, 2013
Tags: 1974, John, keith moon, Linda, Paul
Posted in Beatle Photos | 12 Comments »
TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE ‘UH OH!:
Friday, May 3rd, 2013
Tags: Harry, keith moon, Ringo, Zak
Posted in Beatle Photos | 6 Comments »
John Lennon – Starting Over
ZAC, JASON AND LEE:
Saturday, February 2nd, 2013
Tags: Jason, keith moon, Lee, Zac
Posted in Beatle Photos | 2 Comments »
Mind Games-John Lennon(OFFICIAL VIDEO)
KEITH AND ZAK:
Friday, July 1st, 2011
Tags: keith moon, Zak Starkey
Posted in Beatle Photos | 2 Comments »
FROM THE ‘UH OH’ FILES:
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011
Tags: Harry Nillson, keith moon, Ringo
Posted in Beatle Photos | 5 Comments »
WHOLE LOT OF MISCHIEF:
Thursday, April 14th, 2011
Tags: Harry Nilsson, keith moon, Ringo
Posted in Beatle Photos | 4 Comments »
COUNT DOWN:
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011
Tags: keith moon, Ringo
Posted in Beatle Photos | 11 Comments »
ZAK WITH UNCLE KEITH:
Friday, October 22nd, 2010
Tags: keith moon, Zak Starkey
Posted in Beatle Photos | 4 Comments »
ANOTHER FROM THE ‘UH OH’ SERIES:
Friday, June 25th, 2010
Tags: keith moon, Ringo
Posted in Beatle Photos | 3 Comments »
FRIDAY ‘UH OH’:
Friday, March 5th, 2010
Tags: keith moon, Linda, Paul, Ringo
Posted in Beatle Photos | 4 Comments »
ANOTHER IN THE ‘UH OH’ SERIES:
Friday, February 12th, 2010
Tags: Harry, keith moon, Ringo
Posted in Beatle Photos | 4 Comments »
UH OH:
Monday, February 8th, 2010
Tags: keith moon, Ringo
Posted in Beatle Photos | No Comments »
Below is a portion of an article by Philip Norman about John Lennon’s LOST WEEKEND in Los Angeles (for 14 months) when John was drinking heavily.
Lennon’s adultery pact: When John left Yoko for a year of reckless debauchery he told her ‘you must take a lover too’
By PHILIP NORMAN FOR MAILONLINE
UPDATED: 11:28 EST, 6 October 2008
During their first four years together as a couple, John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent virtually every minute of every day together.
Though they continued to exhilarate each other on a creative level, their physical relationship inevitably lost some of its initial blaze.
John’s sexual drive remained as intense as ever, but Yoko was finding herself less able, or inclined, to deal with it.
She was an increasingly unresponsive lover and John taunted her that she was like a Victorian wife – ‘you just lie there and think of England’.
More than friends: John Lennon with his assistant May Pang at the end of the Seventies
They often discussed the raging sexual hunger that had been so easy to indulge when he was on the road with The Beatles.
He had expected it to go away when he hooked up with Yoko, but it hadn’t.
‘I don’t understand it,’ he would tell her. ‘I’m madly in love with you, but why do I still keep looking at girls in the street?’
He wasn’t just looking. In New York, where they lived, they were invited to a party at the home of a Left-wing activist on the night of Richard Nixon’s re- election to the White House in 1972.
Upset at Nixon winning again, John was totally out of his head on drugs, pills and drink.
Yoko recalls a girl there, ‘not the kind you’d ever think John would be attracted to. She didn’t come on to him at all, but he just pulled her and went into the next room’.
As the grunts and groans of her husband having sex with another woman came through the wall, somebody put on a Bob Dylan record to try to drown the noise and spare Yoko’s blushes ‘but we heard it anyway’.
She tried to stay calm, and asked one of her assistants to go in with a flower for John and tell him she still loved him.
The assistant, understandably, refused, and Yoko was left with much to think about.
‘That situation really woke me up,’ said Yoko.
She and John had sacrificed a lot to be together and it was worth it because they were so much in love.
Re-united: John and Yoko Ono in 1980
Though eager to accept the sexual freedom Yoko was offering, John felt squeamish about doing anything under her nose in New York.
Inseparable: With Yoko at a news conference in New York in 1973
‘So then I suggested Los Angeles,’ she remembers, ‘and he just lit up.’
The problem was that, since his earliest days as a Beatle, he had never travelled anywhere alone or had to fend for himself.
Somebody would have to go with him. Yoko looked over the various young females in their circle and chose May Pang, a 22-year-old Chinese American who worked as an assistant to both of them.
She was good at her job, and extremely pretty.
‘I said to John: “What about May?” He said: “Oh no, not May!” – but it was like he doth protest too much. I went to May and said: “You have to accompany John to LA because I have things to do here.”‘
‘I didn’t say: “Do it” or anything like that. It was just to be an assistant, to go there. But I knew what might happen, because he was never without somebody, never on his own.’
John was to call the next 14 months his Lost Weekend, borrowing the title of Billy Wilder’s film about alcoholism and urban loneliness.
Like that film, alcohol certainly loomed large in John’s West Coast odyssey, as did loneliness and self-loathing.
‘I hadn’t been a bachelor since I was 20 or something, and I thought, Whoopee!’ he would recall. But the reality of life without Yoko was ‘god-awful’.
Fab Four: But John’s increasingly crazed actions in LA were a disappointment for Beatles fans
May Pang’s precise role in the scenario would never be clear, least of all to May herself.
In the book she subsequently wrote, called Loving John, she portrayed herself as a young woman of strong Catholic scruples who was at first scandalised by the suggestion that she become John’s mistress – even though, by her own account, they had already had a surreptitious fling in New York…
Another of John’s friends, photographer Bob Gruen, said: ‘It wasn’t like he left his wife for the mistress. He left his wife for wild times that his secretary oversaw.’
May was indisputably John’s only public female companion during the Lost Weekend.
But privately, Gruen reckons, there were dozens of other women, who thereafter ‘would really treasure that hour, that ten minutes, that night with John Lennon’.
Let off the lead, John ‘hit the bottle like I was 19 or 20′. Los Angeles provided lots of dangerous drinking companions, such as the singer Harry Nilsson and The Who drummer Keith Moon.
Inspirational: The pair in 1968, when their relationship provided artistic ideas both used in their work
And as ever with John, just a couple of drinks changed him in an instant from irresistible charmer and jokester to surly, venom-tongued, trouble-seeking and often violent drunk.
‘When he was in that state and a fan spotted him and came over for an autograph, it was pitiful,’ Mintz remembers.
‘This was the Beatle who had lifted us onto a higher plane of consciousness with his lyrics, and here he was spilling drink on his trousers and not able to form a cohe