Forty-one years ago, on a cool spring night in Hollywood, I found myself standing across a pool table from John Lennon.
He was a symphony in black, right down to his leather trousers. His hair hung to his shoulders. Little black-lensed sunglasses perched at the end of his long thin-tipped nose as he leaned over to stroke the cue ball. He seemed off in a world of his own. Was he drunk? High? Both? The night before – word had spread quickly around town – he had walked into Whisky à Go-Go nightclub with a Kotex sanitary towel taped to his forehead.
It was late March 1974, and Lennon was on his infamous “lost weekend”, having left Yoko Ono and split for the coast with a young woman named May Pang. She too was at the table, pretty and friendly, but it was Lennon who fixed my attention. I had been 12 when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, a jolt of sheer joy to blow away the pall of President Kennedy’s assassination. The group had broken up, but their aura had not diminished.
The place was the home of the erstwhile Rat Packer Peter Lawford, an opulent apartment occupying the second floor of a house just south of Sunset Boulevard: what passed for reduced circumstances in Tinseltown. The place was packed with the famous and beautiful — Ringo Starr was also there that night, and Mick Jagger and his then-wife Bianca, and any number of other pretty faces. It was a hallucinatory evening, though I myself partook of nothing stronger than a few beers and many cigarettes, in spite of the fact that I didn’t smoke.
I was in Hollywood with my brother Peter, covering the Oscars for Harper’s Magazine, having somehow bamboozled that esteemed journal’s editor into giving us a big assignment and expense money, notwithstanding the fact that neither of us had ever written a word for a publication outside of high-school and college newspapers. We were young and ballsy. It also helped our cause that my brother was friends with Peter Lawford’s son Christopher, who had promised not only to take photos for our article but, through his father, to hook us up with lots of stars.
And here they were.
John prowled the table with his cue. His pool wasn’t worth a lick, but it didn’t matter. As he lined up his shots, he was singing “O Solzhenitsyn” to the tune of “O Sole Mio” …
I wanted in the worst way to say something to him, to make contact – but what could I say? I was 22, and impossibly intimidated, not just by him, but by the wall he’d built around himself. I lit Bianca Jagger’s cigarette that night, and traded pool-table jokes with Ringo, who was as down to earth as any guy you might meet in a working-man’s bar. But John Lennon? He was in a world of his own.
Sinatra: The Chairman by James Kaplan is published by Sphere at £30. To order a copy for £24, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
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