The Last Days of John Lennon by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Although moving uptown may have eased some of the couple’s concerns, it certainly hasn’t addressed their biggest problems. The episode at Jerry Rubin’s place has been festering.

“That situation really woke me up,” Yoko says. “I thought, ‘Okay, we were so much in love with each other and that’s why we sacrificed everything, my daughter, everything. It was worth it if we were totally in love with each other. But if he wants to make it with another girl or something, what am I doing?’”

Yoko confides in their twenty-two-year-old assistant, May Pang. “Listen, May,” she says. “John and I are not getting along. We’ve been arguing. We’re growing apart.”

The rift has also been apparent to lawyer Leon Wildes. “They had a loving relationship and it broke down because of all that pressure,” he says, “Nixon being reelected and so on.”

Regardless of their marital troubles, the couple’s shared revulsion for Nixon—who has maintained since June 22, 1972, that the White House had no involvement in the failed attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate—is stronger than ever. The Watergate hearings begin on May 17, 1973, and a month later, on June 18, John and Yoko are given an opportunity to attend in person.

They accept, surely pleased at the chance to observe the people who’ve been persecuting them being held to the fire.

John and Yoko travel together to Washington, DC, to witness testimony from John Dean, who has been ousted as White House counsel over his role in the Watergate scandal. In the first row of spectators sits Dean’s wife—Mrs. Maureen “Mo” Dean, who’s wearing a towering hairdo—and just behind her is Elvin Bell, an adviser to Nixon during his negotiations with Soviet Union general secretary Leonid Brezhnev (resulting in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, a.k.a. SALT). Bell has a security clearance high enough to win him a second-row seat, but while he is craning his neck to see around Mrs. Dean, a woman taps him on the shoulder and says, “Pardon me, please,” as she moves past.

He glances at her and is startled to notice that she and her male companion look familiar.

Suddenly, Bell makes the connection. It’s John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the famous antiwar artists, who’ve taken the two seats beside his.

John and Yoko strike up a conversation with Bell during a break in the testimony, and their back-and-forth continues throughout the day, mostly a barrage of questions, from the benign—“Are you a baritone or bass when you sing?”—to the more pressing: “Why is your country fighting in Vietnam?,” a concern that Bell can’t fully answer.

Several photos are snapped of John and Yoko in the Washington, DC, audience that day. They will be the last taken of the two of them together for quite some time.

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