The tidal wave of grief that followed the murder of John Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980, flowed from several sources. Perhaps the most gaping of these was the shocking obliteration of a decade’s worth of hope. Millions awoke one morning bleak with the promise of winter to learn that now the Beatles could never get back together, that the expansive spirit of the ’60s had definitively expired ten years past its prime.
But there were other, more pertinent reasons for mourning Lennon’s passing. He was not simply the megastar founder of a legendary rock group but a demonstrably troubled man who seemed to be in the process of beating back his demons. After five years of mysterious silence, he had released a new album, Double Fantasy, on which he and his wife Yoko Ono alternately performed love songs. Suddenly Lennon was dominating the airwaves again with his hit single from the album, Starting Over. And he was talking to reporters, telling interviewers about his life as a househusband, baking bread and caring for his and Yoko’s young son Sean. That he should be cut down at the beginning of this new flowering, two months after his 40th birthday, just when he was starting over, seemed an intolerable irony.
It still does, of course; nothing can change the harsh reality of Lennon’s death. But Albert Goldman’s controversial new biography offers unsettling evidence of how thoroughly John and Yoko distorted the messy details of their lives for public consumption. Apparently the mythmaking machinery was working overtime during the fall of 1980. For one thing, the much heralded marriage was on the rocks and headed for worse. Yoko told a confidant of her plans to divorce her husband after the work on Double Fantasy was completed: “I need to free myself of the Lennon name.” Her tender contributions to that album were inspired not by John, as everyone was led to believe, but by a man named Sam Green, her lover of the moment. And Lennon’s tales of cozy domesticity in the Dakota, his Manhattan apartment house, did not stand up to Goldman’s six years of research and interviews; servants handled the baking and child minding while John either nodded off or padded about the place naked and drugged to his eyeballs.
Goldman deserves considerable credit for making such sordid, depressing material compulsively readable. The Lives of John Lennon is a far more balanced and objective biography than his Elvis (1981). Goldman, a pop-culture maven and former professor of English at Columbia University, had no sympathy for Presley or for the gospel, country and rockabilly traditions that fused in his music. Much of Elvis crouches at the level of a self-conscious hipster poking fun at a greaseball bumpkin.
Lennon, on the other hand, was too smart, self-deprecating and evasive to be an easy target for ridicule. Well into his book, Goldman drops a small complaint about the difficulties he had in getting at the truth of his subject: “Interview a score of people who interacted strongly with Lennon and you will get a score of Lennons, each one a man highly congenial to your source.” This problem with evidence suggests why Goldman wrote The Lives, rather than The Life, in his title. The complications do not end here. Those eyewitnesses to facets of Lennon’s life who cooperated with Goldman tend to be granted credibility and gentle treatment; those who refused to talk, most notably Yoko, are in for some rough handling. And another, major obstacle faced the Lennon biographer-to-be: John’s story from his birth up to the dissolution of the Beatles, toward the end of 1969, has been endlessly researched, told and repeated. Hence roughly half of Goldman’s immense book deals with Lennon’s post-Beatle period, the ten maddest and least productive years of his adult life.
This skewed perspective undoubtedly highlights Lennon at his absolute worst. Adrift, he was a very bad piece of work: a drunken, heroin-addicted woman basher and room wrecker who was catatonically depressed and dependent on his manipulative wife. At the same time, Goldman’s emphasis dovetails nicely with the revised version of his own life that Lennon peddled during his last years. He disparaged the Beatles and his role in their success. He told one interviewer: “We sold out, you know. The music was dead before we even went on the theater tour of Britain.” Goldman obediently parrots this view, arguing that the Beatles “might have rocked with the tough working-class belligerence of the Who, becoming a group whose musical gestures, seconded by corresponding stage gestures, would have created a rock theater that could have enabled John Lennon to enact the psychodrama seething inside his soul.” The biographer adds, ” ‘Selling Out’ is the missing chapter in the history of the Beatles. It’s the chapter that nobody has ever wanted to write.”
For good reason, since the idea is crazy. Even Goldman recognizes that the discipline accepted by the Beatles proved liberating. With the album Rubber Soul, he writes, “Lennon was employing the new medium of pop song like a serious artist.” In fact, when Lennon could harness his wit and rage within commercial demands, he simply blew away restraints and claimed new territory for the popular imagination. What, then, compelled him to destroy the most successful performing group on earth? Why did he consign his fate to a woman who would later ask friends, “How can that oaf be so successful when I am so much more talented and educated?” Goldman provides reams of material but few answers. The best he can come up with is Lennon’s unhappy motherless childhood. That may explain neurosis; the peculiar, electric genius still waits for a proper accounting.
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