Get Booked – Lesley-Ann Jones, Who Killed John Lennon

Hello, I'm Hazel and this is Get Booked for Women's and Men's Radio Station, a show all about books and their incredible way to help support good emotional well-being and enrich our minds, learn about people and life. Books can distract, entertain, enlighten, and especially in 2020, provide us something to get involved with and pass the time. Now we have such a treat in store for you today, especially you rock and roll fans. The woman with the knowledge and vocabulary to write unique autobiographies of some of the greatest of our times and those of the times before some of us, Lesley-Ann Jones has now turned her eloquent and subjective talents to John Lennon. Who killed, not shot, John Lennon? What a ride! Are you ready? Leslie-Anne, thank you so much for joining us on Get Booked. How are you? I'm good, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for having me. Oh, you're very welcome. My children, my cats, and my dog have been listening to the Beatles and John Lennon for the last couple of weeks because I've been absolutely obsessed. It's a funny thing, isn't it? I— my daughter messaged me, she was driving down to Exeter where she graduated from actually this summer, and she's equally obsessed, listening to the Beatles all the time and sending me little messages like, you know, uh, who was Loretta in Get Back? And then I have to stop what I'm doing to suddenly explain, uh, the appearance of a new character in the song and that kind of thing. Well, the thing is though as well, we Everybody, no matter how old they are, knows the Beatles songs. They don't always know who's written what and why they've written it, and half the time, you know, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, it's just a fun jolly track until you either get told what it means or you read a book like yours and you kind of understand the different meanings and you want to listen again with a slightly different perspective. And I've always been a huge fan of The Beatles anyway, but after reading this, I mean, I downloaded all of it onto Spotify. I've been listening to it in the gym. I have been that annoying person in the gym and on dog walks not realizing that I'm singing. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, singing and music, songwriting, all our salvation, isn't it? Especially now. Well, yeah, and also it does bring joy, and also it's that kind of melancholy effect as well. There's some— do you know what? I'd not actually listened to some of John Lennon's songs before, like 'Mother,' and I've just been playing them constantly, and it's kind of— my mind's been off in a little bit of a different place. I've got to be honest, I thought I knew the Beatles, And I have a completely different perspective after reading your book. It is incredibly enlightening, and your knowledge, not only of the Beatles and John Lennon, but of rock and roll, is encyclopedic. I mean, where do you keep all this information? You— it's just, it's unbelievable. I mean, I actually had to stop quite often throughout the book to go and Google certain elements just to kind of get with the program a little bit. Have you, have you found a few people I've had people who've read the book saying that. I really have. It's the reason why I do a notes section at the back because there are so many kind of little side roads that you could go down, little cul-de-sacs. I could take all of those on the way while I'm writing about a specific thing, but that would divert me from the story. So I always create this little section at the back of the book where I explain certain things that crop up. Which need explaining, but the place to explain them isn't actually in that place, if you know what I mean. So I do have that. As for the knowledge, the encyclopedic stuff, I think it's just a question of having been in that world for such a long time. It's more than 30 years, and I was 20-odd years on Fleet Street, so I've got to know a lot of these people over the years. I've piled it all away, and of course, what journalists do, we're very well trained, we store everything, we have memories like elephants, and we always know where to refer back to, to find a certain little thing that might just be hovering on the top shelf of your mind somewhere, and you think, 'Oh yeah, I'll bring that down.' And of course, all these artists interact, so many of them knew each other, they were of the same era, and so their stories do overlap, and for someone like me doing this kind of work, that's very helpful. Well, yeah, I mean, I actually, I sometimes find it quite hard to digest the amount of information, and I kind of, I found it quite easy to go, easier, sorry, to go off and Google Mei Pang. And when you talked about the screeching of, well, the screaming of Yoko Ono, I was Googling it, and I was kind of I was living through the whole book. I was kind of going off and watching various films left, right, and center. But there is one section, actually, I mean, there is an incredible amount of information in here. How long did it take you to put all this together? I would have liked longer. I would always like longer because, you know, books are an immense undertaking. I had About 14 months to complete the whole thing from start to finish, and that included my research trips to New York, Hamburg, Liverpool, and a lot of stuff in London as well. Interviews left, right, and center, and of course pulling out my own archive. So I had done interviews with people like Cynthia Lennon, John's first wife, and various other people, tracking down, uh, friends and so on who had known the Beatles in the past, people like Klaus Voormann, who was with them in Hamburg in the early '60s. And doing those interviews, getting all of that together, and then comes the point where you have to commit to the writing. And I find, having, having done a lot of books now, the thing that works for me is to almost take it up to the wire. So I have a date in my diary at which I have to commence and commit to the writing process. Otherwise I'm not going to meet the deadline. And I have a horror of missing deadlines. So I have that date in my diary as well. I work out how many words I have to do a day. I have to write every day during the writing process, otherwise I lose momentum. And then I sit there and I commit to it. Having— I have to say, having made out a big flat plan, because, you know, I'm a journalist at heart and we worked to flat plans in the good old days, newspapers and magazines. So I do plan the whole thing out. On a huge sheet of A4— well, actually A2, I mean, not even A4, um, and sort of work it out chapter by chapter, and then fill in what goes in what chapter, and then link the chapters all together and so on. So it's a building process really, um, and then I kind of do 5 edits of the whole thing when I'm finished. I do edits for different reasons, um, the final one is putting it through the golden typewriter and making sure it's not repetitious and that it all hangs together and that it tells a story primarily. It has to be readable, it has to bring something to the reader and make them want to turn the page. That's the most important aspect of writing any book. Do you know what, I— it's normally certain autobiographies, they can get quite repetitive, but this was, you know, the page-turner. I would sit there for 2 or 3 hours at a time. The kids loved it. They've been able to play on tech so much over the last week or two because I've just been ignoring them. It was— I mean, the amount of information that was in this book that I just didn't know about. And, you know, sometimes we've kind of known about certain elements of what you write about in Who Killed John Lennon, but we kind of forget and we gloss over the past sometimes because of a preferred memory that we choose to have of, say, John Lennon or or the Beatles, you know, the kind of affable, very smart foursome who, turns out, they were womanizing, naughty, drug-taking, you know, absolutely off the rails. They were everything that we thought they weren't, and that was a very smart packaging move by their manager Brian Epstein to present to the world this squeaky clean foursome, all dressed the same, like we used to dress our little children the same. You know, my mother dressed me the same as my sisters, and there was that safe aspect to them, which of course wasn't reality. And today we know much more about our celebrities because of media and the internet and so on, so we are not surprised when we hear about the misbehavior and the fact that they're just as human as we are. I think in the old days there was a veil drawn over all that kind of thing, and the expectation was that they were squeaky clean boys that you could take home to mom for tea, and nothing could have been further from the truth. Oh, I mean, I was absolutely obsessed just reading about it. I've been waxing lyrical to various people. Well, thank you. Yeah, well, I've got a lot of people who have already bought the book. They are extremely keen to get into it. But just for our listeners, there was this one paragraph that kind of sums up just how bonkers the world was, and if you don't mind, I'm going to read it. It's on page 236, where it said, "None of them was without fault on the romance and relationship front. Paul had done with Jane Asher and was now married to Linda. Ringo had admitted womanizing for England and had driven his distraught wife Maureen into the arms of another lover, who happened to be George Harrison, who 'John accused of virtual incest,' and you can see where it's coming from. 'George's wife Patty spilled to Ringo, who demanded divorce, which Mo resisted. She also wiped herself out on a motorbike and had to have her face rewired, but in the end it was Starr's affair with an American model that destroyed their marriage anyway. Patty Harrison moonlighted with Ronnie Wood, while Harrison had an affair with Wood's first wife, Christine, whom Wood had nicked from Eric Clapton in the first place.' So basically I found this paragraph hilarious because it was all just weaved in together. Everybody was kind of sleeping with each other and kind of swapping wives, and it was kind of like— it was quite incestuous, wasn't it? It was, and it probably still is, you know. I'm sure. I'm not that surprised by it. I think that was that world. It's like any industry. It's a very small world, isn't it? Whether we're talking rock and roll or, you know, newspapers or publishing in general. Any industry is small to those who are contained within and working within it. The one aspect of that that really kind of stopped my heart in a way, because she was a very vulnerable person, was Maureen, Ringo's first wife, who probably wasn't really that worldly-wise or clued up. And George Harrison probably should have stayed away from her because she was a sister to the band. And therefore that was pretty much incest. Yeah, but it was all, you know what, all's fair in rock and roll, don't they say? Yeah, all's fair in love and war in rock and roll, yeah. It is a warped and wonderful world, and it must have been fantastic to be in it. A bit like, you know, with Cynthia Lennon, you know, she knew what was going on, but she just wanted to be a part of it, and people I never knew that John Lennon was so troubled and narcissistic and, well, basically the person that he was. I had no idea. But there's something about men like that where women, or, you know, men as well, just want to fix them. And it's quite addictive, isn't it? It is. It's all about the mother, isn't it? We can take it right back to when John's mother, Julia, abandoned him basically into the care of her elder sister, Mimi. Smith, uh, who was a very caring, devoted woman. She was childless herself, and she did rule the roost with a rod of iron, and she brought up John very well but without affection. And he grew very close to her husband, his Uncle George, and it was George who awakened, uh, John's creativity by introducing him to newspapers and how to do crosswords and sketching and drawing and painting and writing poems, that kind of thing. And Mimi would look upon in disdain and chuck all the paperwork away. And John, even at the age of 7, was saying to her, "You throw away my drawings and my writings, Mimi. You'll be sorry when I'm famous." Almost as though he had a sense of his own destiny when he was a tiny boy. And then Uncle George went and died when John was 15. That was devastating. And then John's own mother, with whom he was back in contact by this time, went and got herself knocked down by a car outside Mimi's home. And so he lost her. She died when he was 17. And he thereafter had to draw the curtains on that bit of road outside the house where she died for the rest of the time that he lived with Mimi. So he was very damaged by that. He couldn't resolve that loss of his mother. And so many of his songs— you mentioned "Mother." There was also "Julia." These are impassioned pleas. Boy crying out to his mother, with whom he can never restore his relationship because she's died. Do you know what? Last week I had the most realistic dream where I was there witnessing her being knocked over. Really? So that just shows the relatable prose in this book and how you made it come to life that I woke up and suddenly went, whoa, that was in so much detail. I mean, I was even walking down the road and just kind of witnessed it. Oh my goodness. So that is, that is definitely testament to just how, you know, incredibly— I mean, you just, you make the whole story come alive. But I woke up going, whoa, that's, that, that's weird. I think this book is affecting me. That's very nice to hear. I tried to put myself in John's shoes. I tried to approach his story from the point of view of a woman and also a mother, because I was very aware of the fact that virtually all the books about John had been written by male music writers, with the exception of two books by Cynthia Lennon, which obviously were very personal memoirs of her time with John, and also a pair of books by his sister Julia Baird, who again came across as quite embittered by her personal experience of the way her life had been handled, not so much in relation to John. So I wanted to write something much more all-encompassing, but from a woman's point of view, because I felt that it was women who dominated John's life, and women who saved him, and who gave him the ability, if you like, to express his angst and his mental health. We didn't talk about mental health in those days, but we do talk about it all the time now. And these were cries for help from John through those songs. Even a song like Help, which John wrote at the age of 24, and it's got a jolly upbeat tune, so you're dancing around, help, I need somebody. But he's crying out to us, help, I need somebody. It was actually a plea. How plain can it get? So it's a desperate, plaintive cry for help. And so much of John's songwriting was. And this was, of course, him trying to make sense of his life, trying to find something to fill the void. And I had come across this in so many rock stars down the years. The reason they begin to create, the reason they write songs, is that they're trying to fill that void and get at their truth and work out who they are. But I find when you're— I talk about this quite often on Get Butts— when your mind is troubled or there's something just whirling around and around and you just can't make sense of it, the best thing to do is to write it down because then you can make sense of it. And quite often when you write something down like that, it does sound quite poetic. And that's obviously what he did. Yeah, it can't— you know, it is, uh, not everybody can become John Lennon, of course, or a member of the Beatles. But see, Paul was in a similar boat because he'd lost his mother at a very young age as well. So these two colliding at that fete in July 1957 in Liverpool, when John's Quarrymen had been playing a gig on the back of a truck, and then they went across the road to the church hall to rehearse for another gig that evening, and in walks Ivan Vaughan, a mutual friend with a sort of baby-faced lad from school, 15-year-old Paul McCartney. And Paul McCartney could remember lyrics, and he could tune a guitar, and he could do things that John couldn't do. And there they were, they came face to face for the first time, and that energy sparked, and that connection gelled. And I've always felt that they were never as creative beyond the Beatles as individuals, as they were together. Because whatever it was, that chemistry between them, which is indefinable, unquantifiable, that happened that day, and that took them forward for those 7 years of being the Beatles together. I do find the exploration of the human psyche, especially in regards to Paul and John, because John was threatened by him, but also who knew that they could be incredible working together. Just that whole kind of concept, I mean, it enthralled me, it really did. It was, and a bit like when you said, actually exactly when you said, this is a female perspective on the life of John Lennon, and I did say in the intro that it is quite subjective, but the subjective opinion of a female really made this book for me because it had— it gave you a different outlook and kind of opened your mind. I think it was such a psychological exploration throughout the whole book of so many different characters from that era. Well, thank you. I mean, you're right to use the word threatened. John was threatened by Paul. He had to make a decision in that moment. Do I welcome this 'babyface' into my band and risk being upstaged by him, being eclipsed by him, because he clearly is the superior musician here. But if I bring him in, this will be better for my band. And it is quite interesting because we didn't have female songwriting partnerships coming through during those years. The female bands and solo artists tended to be written for by other people. But here you've got two musicians, like-minded, bringing their different strengths to the table and combining them, something we never saw in the '60s among women. Wow. Um, yeah, I mean, did you— whilst you were writing this book, did you love the process of kind of having that psychological journey with everybody, because quite a bit of the book is your opinion on how things kind of were in those times. Do you agree? Oh, very much so. I've always made clear that this isn't a biography. Some reviewers, you know, I don't mean professional ones, jump to criticize because they always do, and they will make comments about, you know, well, this is not a normal biography. This is— well, no, I never said it was a biography. This was my personal journey back through John's life to try and piece together the psychology behind the man and to work out why he did the things he did, why he made certain decisions, why he left his wife for somebody else, why he was in love with Alma Cogan thinking that Cynthia didn't know, all of that kind of thing. And, and it was very much me retracing his steps and offering my own view of why. As I said, I knew the, the who, the what, the when, and the where, but what I didn't know was why John was that way. And that's what I set out to find out. So that isn't a biography. That's not a standard shape of a biographical book in any form. There has to be a background. I have to have things to hang it on as I go along. But it was very much from my heart. And from my soul, trying to empathize with him and to work out who he was. And yet exploring different female roles, and I just, I found that— do you know what, it was your dry sense of humor that made it a perfect read for me, because it was, it was quite unique. I mean, I do, I do kind of describe it to people who have been interested in what I've been reading as an autobiography, but I guess, yeah, it's not, it's not exactly, but it is slightly under that umbrella, isn't it? It's, well, it's not an autobiography in that it's not about me. Um, it's very much about John, but it's also about those people who underpinned him and who enabled him creatively and personally. And you will have read that I strongly feel that Yoko Ono was his salvation. That she did effectively save his life. I think I might have feared for his life otherwise. She didn't break up the Beatles. The Beatles were already broken. She may have been the catalyst. She may have been the excuse that John was looking for to jump ship, to walk away. What he really wanted to do— he was fed up with that whole lifestyle and the media attention and all the attendant pressure, and he wanted to make music with other musicians. And Yoko came to the relationship as a musician as well as an artist. She was a trained pianist. There was much criticism at the time, you know, who does this woman think she is trying to make music with a Beatle? Well, she was a musician and she had been for years. She had every right to, whereas Paul McCartney took Linda, his first wife, on the road with him because he wanted her with him. And so he taught her to to play keyboards and to sing backing vocals. That was a different setup. And Linda was a wonderful woman, by the way. I had a good relationship with her, and she was very kind to me. Yuko is more caustic, less approachable, uh, quick to sue, quick to send out a lawsuit, um, very defensive of the whole legacy of John and protective of that. And I sometimes wonder what will happen when she's gone. She's 87 now. Yes, she has her son Sean there to sort of manage the legacy and so on, but does he want to spend his life among lawyers and being defensive of the legacy the way she has? Do you know what, I was very torn in regard to Yoko Ono because she is as mad as a box of frogs, in my opinion, but also she was completely unique and Even now in modern day, we are unfortunately still critical of women who are fiercely independent and, you know, are very strong in their opinions. So imagine, you know, 50 years ago how unforgiving the whole world must have been in her opinion of her. I mean, She was— I watched one of the videos of her just screaming in a gallery, and it's— do you think she was before her time? Very much so, and I say this in the book, that along came Björk in my era from Iceland, and we all thought this was a completely unique artist. We'd never seen anything like her before, but of course we had. We'd seen Yoko Ono. The world wasn't ready for Yoko at the time she was expressing the pain of war and the suffering of women and children throughout war-torn countries and so on. We just weren't ready for that at that stage. And I think had she come along a little bit later, you know, she may well have had a credible career. Sorry, I've got a little bit of a cough. However, the juxtaposition of her peace and love and understanding that she wanted to get out to everybody, and yet she was a heroin addict? Well, she did resort, as did John, as did so many other artists. You know, they, they never could explain why they became hooked on heroin in the first place. I've never tried it myself, so I don't understand the process. It's highly addictive, we know that, and it usually starts with much softer drugs, doesn't it? It— they'll have a bit of weed or something, they'll smoke a bit of something, and then maybe try the cocaine, and then they need a harder hit, so they'll move on to heroin. Everybody at that stage thought it was good for you. Nobody knew that this was going to turn out to be, to be a killer. And she did resort to it, I suppose, when she was going through difficult periods in her life. She didn't want John to know about her weakness, but of course he'd been there as well. Attitudes towards Class A drugs were very different in those days. Yeah, you know, it was the age of exploration, wasn't it? And I mean, it's just a little bit of a reminder of just exactly what went on in those days. But there's something that I want to bring to our listeners' attention that nobody seems to talk about, and you can't even imagine it happening now in, say, Madison Square Garden. But the prolific urination effect of women watching the Beatles. Well, they weren't exactly women, were they? They were young girls, mostly teenagers, I think we call them now. And it's hysteria. It's the aftereffect of hysteria when you lose control of your bladder and just it all comes out. Those of us who've had children know about losing control of the bladder, and I suppose elderly ladies, you know, who rely on the various products on the market to help them walk around comfortably, shall we say. The, the loss of control of one's bladder is, um, it's, it's a very feminine problem, I think. And those girls wouldn't have experienced anything like that before, but what they were really going through was, was their first intense sexual experience, I suppose, as well, and loss of control was all part of that. You've only got to look at their faces, the expressions were combinations of agony and ecstasy, weren't they, which is what that's all about. You just can't imagine though, you know, tens, maybe hundreds of women wetting themselves and carrying on listening. I mean, it's just not something you would expect now if, you know, You still get teenagers who are absolutely obsessed with bands, but you can't imagine it happening, you know, in Wembley or anything like that now. And yet it was quite a common occurrence for the Beatles. I mean, they were ridiculously popular, more popular than anything else that's ever been before. Yeah, it was a phenomenon, wasn't it? And I've been to gigs like Justin Bieber and so on with my young children back in the day, and Yes, there's hysteria, but it's not at that same level. Not that I experienced it myself because I was too young, but, uh, certainly from having watched so much footage and so on, and nothing comes close to the phenomenon of the Beatles. There hadn't been anything like that before. It's just— it just seems bonkers. Funnily enough, that wasn't something that I Googled while I was reading it. Oh, I'm very glad to hear it. And what I did when I was discussing this book a couple of days ago, when John Lennon was shot, it's up there with, where were you when the Twin Towers came down, when Princess Di died, where were you when John Lennon was shot? That everybody always knows those answers, don't they? Yes, they do, and I allude to that in the book, the sort of that eternal triangle, really. And I remember taking my children to a Paul McCartney gig at the O2 in December 2018. We were talking about the Beatles in the car on the way home. They know all the songs, the lyrics, the harmonies, the melodies. They play them. They play guitar and piano, and, you know, they could turn out any Beatles song. But they knew very little about the individuals who created those songs. I said to my son, what you have to is that for my generation, John Lennon was our JFK, at which point he said, "But what does an airport have to do with it?" He didn't even know who JFK was, so how would he know who John Lennon was? It was very interesting, and I knew at that point that I had to bring John's story up to date for younger generations as well as people who were around during his lifetime. You see, you have, you know, 15, 16, 17-year-olds that go around wearing the t-shirt with that famous walk across the zebra crossing outside Abbey Road, and yet they have no real idea about anything other than just listening to a couple of the songs. It's kind of a religion in its own right that people have no idea about. It shows you the power of music, I think, as well, because they do know the songs, and those songs are in our DNA. You know, your mother could tell you the lyrics to Eleanor Rigby or whatever song you choose. It's— those songs are indelibly in our culture. They're not going anywhere. But people wouldn't necessarily know the life stories of the people behind them. And John's big anniversary is being this year when he would have turned 80, incredibly, and the 40th anniversary of his murder, which I find very hard to believe because I remember it so clearly, uh, that seemed a good time to, to regroup and revisit and to tell his story again. It's actually the day that he was murdered, it's actually my son's birthday. Oh goodness, so you'll never forget it then. No, no. I— do you know what? What I said again about why I love GetBooked and how it helps us to kind of understand other people's lives and give us an insight, and it can never be a bad thing for us to learn and understand more about people. Even if this book wasn't about John Lennon and him being the most— one of the most famous people of the music industry. This book is about understanding what goes on in other people's lives that we don't always understand. To some people, they were just great lyricists, and, you know, Paul McCartney, 'Butter Wouldn't Melt.' But in fact, what goes on underneath— we need to remember that we have no idea what some people are going through. I always think that when I come across, you know, we all do in our lives, someone grumpy, somebody who treats us badly, somebody who gives us short shrift, and I try and think, I don't know what person, what that person's gone through today. I don't know whether somebody's died on them, whether their relationship has broken down, whether the dog is sick, whether they've got an elderly mother they're rushing off to care for, or they've just found out they're losing their home, or some thing that could have happened to them that can distract them from treating other people in a reasonable way that day. And there's always— it's just the tip of the iceberg that we see of people, isn't it? Even in our daily lives, even in our own relationships. I wonder whether it's possible to ever truly know another person. So often you hear of marriages or long-term relationships breaking down, and the other person had absolutely no idea that anything was wrong. And suddenly that person might disappear without even saying anything. I remember having this conversation with the head of music at my son's school, whose wife had left him, and he was distraught. And I said, how did it happen? And he said, well, she left a note on the kitchen table. And I said, at least you got a note. My husband just left without even telling me while I was on the school run. But you never know the reasons for people behaving in such extreme ways. And of course, John Lennon did behave in incredibly extreme ways, and I wanted to find out why. I think you did, and I love the concept, which I assume this is why it is this way, not, not who shot John Lennon, but who killed John Lennon. Because, you know, if it wasn't Marj Chapman, I'm pretty certain he would have either been lost in oblivion and ended up either accidentally killing himself, or somebody— he annoyed enough people, didn't he? Yeah, and there were all kinds of conspiracy theories, weren't there, in the years after his death leading up to the present day, really. What I was driving at with that very cryptic title was, when did the original John Lennon die? And why did he? Because John compromised himself a good deal throughout his career, and he left aspects of himself behind. He went along with things that he didn't agree with, uh, he became things that he wasn't really, and he killed off bits of himself along the way. So I wanted to know when the original John Lennon had died and what had happened there. Is it the original John Lennon though? Because we are constantly evolving, and he just— do you not think he just evolved because of who he was hanging out with, or people who influenced him? He certainly did evolve. We know from, from all the many stories that demonstrate that. But I think there was a version of him who was not quite an adult a man-child really, I suppose we'd call him. The John who managed to shake off Auntie Mimi and all her demands and her rules, and who against the odds got himself into college and was beginning to train for some kind of career, but was so distracted by music and by girls and by everything else that was going on. But there was a form of a person there who could have taken any number of directions, and that's what I would regard as the original person. Right, okay. Yeah, um, it's incredible, isn't it, when, when your life is so out there for people to just have so many opinions about, and it's It's one of the downsides, I guess, of being incredibly famous. And something that you alluded to towards the end of the book, do you think there are different reasons why John was even available to be shot? There seems to be I had the feeling that you thought that there was possibly a little bit more involved in, rather it just being Mark Chapman. There were, um, there weren't any bodyguards around. It's very interesting what went down that night, you know, because John and Yoko living in New York, very dangerous city. They loved it there because they could walk around, every other person person is an A-lister, or was in those days, on the streets of New York. So what difference does another one make? People weren't really taking that much notice of him other than to see him in Central Park having a walk and calling out to him, 'Hi, John, when are the Beatles getting back together?' or whatever. But generally they wouldn't bother him, they wouldn't mob him, and he clearly felt pretty safe there. But it was the case that usually when their car came back to the Dakota Building where they lived, that it would go in through the archway and park in the courtyard, this sort of inner courtyard, and they would alight from the car and go into the building and up in the lift. But on this occasion, the car pulled up at the pavement, at the sidewalk, and they got out in public on the pavement, and they didn't have their bodyguards with them. That you could take— you could read all kinds of things into something like that and think, well, yeah, did this happen purposefully? Did somebody cause this? For them to be unprotected and for that, that car to pull up on the side of the road? I think really not. I think those are horrible coincidences. I heard later that one of the bodyguards was off sick that night, that he had a bad stomach, and who knows, they just weren't there that night. And maybe they just felt they wanted to get home after that night in the studio and they weren't paying much attention. We all take our eye off the ball at some time or another. There was a sentry, a guard, José Perdomo, in the, in the little bronze sentry box outside the Dakota Building, and it was later claimed that he was somehow involved in the Bay of Pigs scandal dating way back, the Cuban crisis, and so on. None of these conspiracy theories ever held water, and nothing was ever proved. And so I think it really was, bottom line, a case of a deranged fan wanting to make a name for himself, which he has admitted in recent weeks when his parole came up again in August, his appeal for release, and he was denied it yet again, of course. And I don't think he should ever be released because he's clearly a danger to society, Mark Chapman. Uh, he wanted to take somebody's life and to go down in history for that. He even said that had he not managed to get John Lennon that night, he would have gone down to Broadway where David Bowie was appearing, um, off— well, the Booth Theater, actually Broadway, as the Elephant Man, and he was going to kill David Bowie instead. And James Taylor recounts a story where he was down in the sidewalk— sorry, in the subway in New York, and he came came across Mark Chapman, obviously didn't know who he was, but this person was behaving very oddly towards him. And with hindsight, having obviously learned what happened to John, he was terrified because the same thing could have happened to him. I do think that it was— I don't want to say just or simply, but it was a case of this deranged man who had it fixed in his head that he wanted to kill a celebrity and become famous for it. It's the greatest tragedy. But I've also said this: that for all we know, John might have quite liked the idea of such a dramatic ending. Oh, I, I read that and I wholeheartedly agreed with you. He had his answers, didn't he? He, he was in a good place. He was only 40, but he'd lived the life of 5 40-year-olds by then. He was back with his soulmate, his partner. He loved her. She was taking care of business. They had their baby Sean. He was back making music, the thing that really drove him and inspired him. And for all we know, he could be looking down going, well, it was a hell of a way out, but look, nobody's ever forgotten it. That's why I think he, he was such a narcissist. He would love that, wouldn't he? I know it sounds really bizarre. It does, in a way. I don't think it's that dark. I mean, you know, there is a thing about rock stars. In order to gain immortality. You've got to die young. Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. That's what James Dean said. Yeah. And people like Michael Jackson, you know, dead at 50. Uh, Jimi Hendrix, 27. Janis Joplin, 27. Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, all 27. So then up rises a theory about the 27 Club. Jim Morrison, same thing, that there's something about turning 27. It's just a coincidence, really. Of course it is. But to be remembered, to go down in history, and for your music to be immortal— and the reason for that is there can't be any more of it. The catalog is finished. You can't record from the other side. So we're not going to get any more music. So the music that does exist becomes more precious to us. Wow. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm trying my best not to have my dodgy cough at the moment. You're doing very well. Oh, thank you. It just— when you said that in the book, I was like, wow, yeah. I mean, as much as he probably did not want to die, it is a kind of perfect ending for him Because of— I mean, I don't think if he wasn't shot then on the 8th of December, I think something else would have got him. Yes, possible. Um, he did wind a lot of people up. He did manage to, uh, terrorize the Nixon administration, and they refused him a green card for the longest time. He feared leaving America because they might not have let him back in. And that battle went on an awful long time and cost a good deal of money, but he got it in the end. And of course, there was the real reason why Yoko and John were in the States in the first place. Everybody thought it was because they were sick and tired of Yoko's, uh, the racist attacks on her and being blamed for breaking up the Beatles, and they had to get away. It wasn't the case. Yoko had a little girl called Kyoko And she was abducted by her American father, Tony Cox. They ran first to Mallorca, and then intelligence led John and Yoko to track them down in America. They never found them. And it was a really bizarre thing. I was having dinner in Stockport, Manchester, with Johnny Hamp, who used to be head of Granada Television and was the first producer to put the Beatles on television. We went out for dinner with his daughter, his blind daughter Meredith. I found this part incredible. Had no idea about any of this. She just started saying, oh well, of course I met Yoko Ono, and in fact I was godmother to her daughter. I said, what? She said, yes. She said, years ago, this poor girl, when she was 12, she'd been involved in a science experiment in school that had literally blown up in her face, and she was blinded by it. And her distraught parents had flown her all over the world to different clinics for treatment. Her sight was never restored, but she was in Houston, Texas at this particular point. She was 17 years old. She was having treatment, and she joined an evangelical church. And a short while afterwards, a young couple joined the church. She had a little girl called Rosemary, and they became friends. They started having lunch together and so on. And then the couple decided they wanted Rosemary to be baptized, and they asked Meredith if she would be the godmother. Of course, Meredith is blind, and she can't see that this little girl called Rosemary is in fact Japanese in ethnic origin. And then came a point when they asked her if she would look after Rosemary for a while because they had to go away. She had no idea that this little girl was really Kyoko, John Lennon's beloved stepdaughter, Yoko's daughter, and that, uh, Tony Cox and his now partner Melinda were on the run from the FBI, from John and Yoko, from the media. And off they went again. They came back and got to the child they called Rosemary and moved on, and then they changed her name again to Ruth. And I've often thought, how confusing for that small child to be going through all these identity changes and being called different names and so on, and having been ripped from the bosom of her mother, whom she never saw again for another 30 years, in fact, long after John had died. And then when Kyoko was about to become a mother herself, she reached out to her birth mother Yoko, and they were reunited. It obviously would never be the same. But imagine being that couple, John and Yoko, all the money in the world, all the fame in the world— there was no more famous couple at that time— even they couldn't find their missing child. And it really amazed me, that story, that Meredith had been carrying this around in her, in her head, in her heart, all these years, and had never thought that it it was significant. We've talked about it since, and she still doesn't really feel that she had any part in that story, but it had never been told before. It's just unbelievable. I mean, there are a lot of bizarre coincidences. Yeah, they're not life. Yeah, there are. But I, you know, you'd have to feel sorry for Yoko. People said, well, she was terrible, she didn't want a relationship with Julian, his first son by Cynthia, and there was sort of stop start on-off scenarios where Julian would come over to New York and spend some time, then he'd have to go back, go to school, and then communications would all break down again. And really it was that Yoko was so bereft at the loss of her child, she couldn't stand to be around children. She also had several miscarriages with John, so they'd lost— and they'd even buried some of these poor little babies, you know. But the salvation— again, that word— was when they got back together after the Elton John concert at Madison Square Garden. And then 9 months later, along came Sean. So poor Julian missed out on a proper relationship with his father because John then poured all of his paternal instincts into his relationship with his second child. Do you know what? There are so you really do touch on— discuss a lot, not touch on— the effect of what happens to the children that are all involved in this story and how it affects— I mean, poor Julian, knowing that Sean was getting 1,000% more of what he should have got from John Lennon, and the way that, you know, John Lennon was treated as a child, all these different kind of scenarios of how these children were damaged back in a time when, you know, there wasn't enough understanding of well-being and the effects on children of the way that they are treated. Um, it's— I mean, have you, have you got a psychology degree? Because she really kind of nailed a lot of the right questions about the, the effect, the long-lasting effect of, of all different children and things that happen to them. I don't have a psychology degree, but I did spend a lot of time interviewing clinical psychiatrists and psychologists to really explore my own theories, which were only theories. You know, I, as I say, I'm not qualified, but I wanted to know and to understand. And having 3 children myself, all of whom went through, uh, quite traumatic times when their father left. I knew firsthand how deeply children are affected by the sins of the fathers, if you like, the, the squabbles of adults. We all think that that doesn't really affect our kids, and if we give them a good Christmas, buy them a new uniform, and so, you know, just throw material things at them. But of course, they're deeply affected by that because they blame themselves. They do think that it's something to do with them that went wrong, which is why Daddy left, and so on. And John, of course, had been abused quite badly during his educational years. Corporal punishment still existed then. It's outlawed now in many countries, especially here, but at that time it was considered fine to hit children, and parents did it too, not just teachers. And that had lasting effects on John, and it made him a violent person. So we know that these things hand down. But I also knew that I needed professional guidance with— you know, we mustn't diagnose John. We can't because he's not here, and it's impossible to diagnose the deceased. We can only surmise, we can make educated guesses, but we mustn't apply any of our modern language, title to, you know, give names to conditions. Some people have tried to say that he had narcissistic personality disorder. Well, that didn't exist during John Lennon's lifetime. We only have those diagnoses now, and we can't diagnose somebody who's died. But I did— yes, I did get a lot of help with that because I was trying to understand him. I did— I thought that your introspection was It was bang on. It was— I found that a fantastic element to the book, of the questions you asked. And obviously, you know, experience, our own experiences help us to ask these questions. But, um, yeah, the, the psychological elements of this book were unbelievable. And something that I like to ask all of the guests who come on GetBooked is, do you have, from your experience, 3 wellbeing tips for our listeners? Oh goodness. Well, I think it's very important to treat each day as a fresh start and to get ready for work. So, even during lockdown, I've been getting up every day. I get up very early. I go to bed early. Get up early, get ready for work. And, you know, so shower and dress and be presentable. As if you were going into a board meeting or so on. I find that very helpful in my approach to my own work because I work in isolation most of the time, especially when I'm doing the actual writing. When I'm getting out and about doing research and interviews and so on, slightly different. But I think as well we mustn't hold it against ourselves when we make mistakes. So this would be tip number 2, to start each day afresh and to forgive oneself for the mistakes of the day before, and to not look too far into the future. There's, there's a poem about not looking further than dinner time, and I've been trying to find that poem recently because somebody quoted it to me a while back. Uh, it was a rector at St. Bride's Church, actually, and I want to find that poem. I'm going to have to go back and ask her because I think it's a very good thing not to look too far forward. The future doesn't exist. The past kind of does. People say, oh, the future and the past don't exist, but the past obviously does because it's there and it happened and we can refer to it. The future, we have no idea. We have to stay away from astrology, horoscopes, predictions, psychics, all those kinds of things, because no human being can know the future. So our business is to be concerned with now and to not look further forward than dinnertime. And those things really helped me, so I just hope that they may help somebody else. Do you know, one of my, one of the favorite lines from a book that I read, and I've actually repeated this a few times on Get Booked, but I love it, and it's from a book called Anxiety Girl, and the reader, sorry, the writer says, anxiety is about, is fretting about the future, and depression is worrying about what's happened in the past. If you live in the now, both can't exist. Yeah, that's very true. There's a lot of wisdom in that. Absolutely. And I love that. And it's easier said than done, but, but yeah, focus on living in the now. There's so many of us. I mean, it takes— it's not, it's not that easy, but sometimes, you know, like learning to ride a bike, all things you have to keep on practicing. Yeah, we have to do a certain amount of prep for the future if it comes, don't we? So we have to make sure we have money aside and that kind of thing, and, and think about next month's mortgage repayment, not just this month, and not to be reckless. But you can't really plan because you don't know what's going to happen next, and that's the thrill of life, I think, the fact that we don't know. Well, we've got to appreciate some— the good elements of that rather than focusing on the bad elements of not knowing the future. I mean, It can be quite exciting not knowing what's going to happen next. Anything could happen, anything could be around the corner, nobody knows, and I find that quite thrilling. Now another question that I like to ask— I can't believe we've raced through the last hour, but one of the other questions I like to ask all of my guests is who is there in the public eye at the moment that you think is completely smashing it out of the park in terms of being a good human being and somebody to follow and listen to and admire? I would have to say Paul McCartney. Uh, he's got a new album out, is McCartney 3. Well, I think it's coming December. He's recorded this during lockdown, uh, playing all the own— the instruments himself, and And you know, he's a genuine artist and he's bringing music out into the world when he doesn't need to prove himself anymore. But he's doing what he started out doing and he's doing it for the good of mankind. To have new music coming from one of the original Beatles, a band that broke up 50 years ago— if he could be, he'd be on the road right now because he's happiest anywhere on the road bringing the music live. He can't do that right now, so he's bringing the music to us recorded. And I think he lives by what he committed his life to 60-odd years ago. He's committed to the one thing. He found the one thing that he could do. He did it, and he did it until other people were convinced that he could do it. And now he does it, and I think we should make the most of him because once he's gone, that's it. Wow. That's a fantastic answer. Are you going to write a book about him soon? I think that would be fantastic. Well, my very dear friend Philip Norman published a biography of Paul McCartney about 3 years ago now, which is— I can't see myself improving on that. Oh, I want your perspective though. I kind of like the sarcasm and the wit that you bring into your writing. And actually, just before we go, because we've only got 30 minutes left, 30 seconds left, sorry, is I want to draw all our listeners' attention to your website, Lesley-Ann Jones, and just to make sure that they go and have a look at all the different books that you do. And thank you so much for joining me today. I've thoroughly enjoyed chatting to you. Thank you ever so much for having me. It's been an absolute delight, and I hope to meet you again.