At some point early this year, somebody in authority decided that it would be a good idea to kick John Lennon and Yoko Ono out of the country. John Lennon, of course, was one of the Beatles, the four Liverpool boys who dominated the popular music of Britain and the United States for most of the nineteen-sixties. In addition to winning great popular success as a singer and composer, both with the Beatles and since their dissolution, in 1970, he has been a film actor (in “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Help,” and “How I Won the War”) and an author (of “In His Own Write” and “A Spaniard in the Works,” two collections of idiosyncratic, pun-laden short stories and verse). He is now thirty-two years old. Yoko Ono, who will be forty years old in February, was an established conceptual artist and avant-garde composer when she married John Lennon, in 1969; since then she, too, has become a rock singer and songwriter (and, incidentally, the most famous person of Japanese origin in the Western world). In the controversy over whether or not the Lennons should be allowed to stay in the United States, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has taken the position that it is merely enforcing the law, and that because John Lennon was convicted in a British court in 1968 of possessing cannabis resin, one of the drugs derived from the Indian hemp plant, he and his wife must be deported. The Immigration Service is a branch of the Department of Justice. Under President Nixon and his Attorneys General, John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst, the Department of Justice has made a practice of bringing charges against people, usually in clumps (the Chicago Seven, the Seattle Seven, and the Catonsville Nine, to name twenty-three), for what many civil libertarians regard as political reasons. The Lennons believe that their own frequently expressed political views—unorthodox from the Justice Department’s point of view, though quite ordinary in Greenwich Village, where they live—are the real reason for the government’s desire to show them the golden door.
John and Yoko, as they are universally called (except by the Immigration Service, which calls them Mr. and Mrs. John W. Lennon), have been in the United States since August 13, 1971. This is the longest time either of them has spent without interruption in one country since their marriage. John had been here before, as a touring Beatle and on business trips, and with Yoko in 1970, when both of them were patients of Dr. Arthur Janov, the psychotherapist and author of “The Primal Scream.” Yoko first visited this country in 1936, when she was three years old. Her parents moved from Tokyo to Scarsdale, New York, when she was nineteen, and she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence. Between 1957 and 1966, she spent most of her time in New York (at one point earning her living as a building superintendent and as a waitress at the Paradox macrobiotic restaurant, on the lower East Side), staging “events” and giving concerts with, among others, John Cage and David Tudor.
Technically, the Lennons were here this time as “visitors for pleasure;” their main purpose, however, was not to enjoy themselves but to try to secure custody of, or at least visiting rights with, Yoko’s daughter, Kyoko Cox, who is now nine years old. Yoko’s divorce, in 1968, from Kyoko’s father, Anthony Cox, a film producer, had been amicable—so amicable, in fact, that at one point the Lennons permitted Mr. Cox to make a documentary film about them in England. Although neither parent had been awarded sole custody of the child, Mr. Cox became increasingly reluctant to let Yoko and her new husband spend time with Kyoko, and finally refused to permit it at all. For a year before the Lennons came to America, they had been chasing Mr. Cox and Kyoko around Europe. In Majorca, Spain, the Lennons caught up with them and spirited Kyoko off to their hotel; but Mr. Cox called the police, and a Spanish court gave the child back to him. The incident added to his fear that the Lennons wanted to take her away from him for good.
Soon after the Lennons arrived in New York, they went to the United States Virgin Islands, to the same court where Yoko had been divorced, and that court awarded her permanent custody of her daughter. Kyoko, however, was in Houston, Texas, with Mr. Cox and his new wife, Melinda, the daughter of a prominent local citizen, and Mr. Cox had started his own custody action there. The judge, Peter Solito, of the Domestic Relations Court of Harris County, ruled that the decision of his court would take precedence over that of the Virgin Islands court, which was still pending. At the hearing, where Yoko was represented by her lawyers, Mr. Cox showed a film the Lennons had sent to Kyoko as a birthday present. It showed John Lennon and Kyoko taking a bath together. On September 29th, Judge Solito awarded temporary custody of the child to Mr. Cox and extensive visiting rights to Yoko. Among other provisions, the court order gave Yoko the right to take her daughter with her for ten days at Christmastime, with the stipulation that the Lennons post a twenty-thousand-dollar bond to insure Kyoko’s return, and that they come to Houston for a weekend beforehand, “in order to reëstablish a relationship with the child.” The Lennons arrived in Houston on December 18th for their weekend with Kyoko, but Mr. Cox refused to let them see her except in his presence. The Lennons went back to New York and their lawyers went back to court, and on December 22nd Judge Solito sentenced Mr. Cox to five days in jail for contempt of court. Just before the bailiff led him away, Mr. Cox, who by this time had become a member of the Evangelical Church, a fundamentalist Protestant sect, shouted, “If any Christians are hearing my voice, I hope you pray for me!” He was released under five thousand dollars’ bond the next day, and the Lennons returned to Houston on December 29th for another try. Mr. Cox, who had been ordered to bring Kyoko to the courthouse, did not show up. He had disappeared on Christmas Eve, taking his wife and daughter with him. Again the Lennons returned to New York, and again their lawyers went to court, this time to file a motion asking that temporary custody of Kyoko be transferred to her mother.
Meanwhile, John and Yoko had moved into a two-room apartment in the basement of a house in the West Village, and they were busy. Both of them are energetic and ambitious, and they have a large appetite for work. They appeared on the air, in contexts as diverse as Bob Fass’s midnight program on WBAI—the New York listener-supported FM radio station—and the Dick Cavett and David Frost television programs. They “co-hosted” the normally bland Mike Douglas show for a week in February. In October of 1971, they each released a new record album—“Imagine” and “Fly,” respectively—and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, mounted the first retrospective exhibition of Yoko’s art, including paintings, sculpture, notational poetic writings, films, and what Yoko calls “pieces.” Many of the last whimsically demanded the participation of the viewer. A row of empty flowerpots was entitled “Imagine the Flowers.” “Cloud Piece” was a water bed with a skylight above it and an inscription reading “Lie down and watch, until a cloud passes from left to right.”
In December, Yoko orchestrated an “event” that, in its particular mixture of cleverness, sentimentality, coyness, sweetness, satire, and mystification, was typical of her work. She placed an advertisement in the Village Voice with a picture of herself walking in front of the Museum of Modern Art and carrying a shopping bag with a big “F’ ” on it. The copy in the advertisement read, “Museum of Modern Art—Yoko Ono—one woman show—Dec. 1st-Dec. 15th.” The “show” consisted of a sandwich man who walked to and fro on the sidewalk in front of the Museum. His sign said:
The “catalogue” for the “show” was published later. It was a big book, a foot square and a hundred and sixteen pages long. It showed Yoko releasing the bottle of flies in the Museum’s garden, and the bulk of it consisted of photographs of different parts of the city, where a hundred and thirty-eight of the flies had purportedly been found. The last photograph in the book showed the box office of the Museum, where the ticket seller had posted a copy of this advertisement with the words “this is not here” scrawled across it. (The phrase was a favorite of the Lennons; at the Everson show, they had distributed dozens of “this is not here” T-shirts.) Following the photographs, the book had several pages of notational writings, mostly directing the reader to do things. One page, for example, offered this program of activities:
The Lennons bought a narrow two-story loft building in SoHo and installed in it six people who work for a movie company they own, Joko Productions. In Wall Street and on the Staten Island Ferry, they shot scenes for a feature film, “Imagine,” planned as a companion piece to the record album of the same name. Joko Productions set to work editing the film (which has not yet been released). During Christmas week, the Elgin Theatre, in Chelsea, put on a program of seven of the Lennons’ experimental films, including “Fly,” which shows a common housefly, in closeup, crawling across a woman’s body for twenty-three minutes, and “Legs,” which shows three hundred and thirty-one pairs of bare legs, mostly belonging to New York artists and intellectuals.
The Lennons spent much of their time at a studio on West Forty-fourth Street, the Record Plant, recording and producing records. The Record Plant was designed specifically for rock musicians. With its shag rugs, acoustically baffled wood-panelled walls, and banks of winking electronic equipment, it has the air of a luxurious space capsule. When the Lennons were working on a record, they spent all night, night after night, at the studio, sleeping until late afternoon and not seeing much daylight. Because each instrument or voice is usually recorded one at a time on one of the sixteen tracks of the studio’s tape equipment and the tracks must afterward be painstakingly “mixed,” or blended, into the final, two-channel product, a thirty- or forty-minute record album may take weeks to produce, exclusive of the time spent writing the music and lyrics. The producer supervises all stages of the recording and mixing, with the result that he must spend more time in the studio than the musicians themselves. John and Yoko produced their own records—in their sixteen months in New York they have turned out three albums of their own material—and they also produced records by a hard-rock group called Elephants Memory and a hoarse-voiced street singer called David Peel. The Lennons came across David Peel in Washington Square Park, where he has been singing on nearly every warm Sunday for seven years. Mr. Peel had been “discovered” before—Elektra Records had released two albums by him—but he was news to the Lennons, and they recruited him for Apple Records, of which John is a part owner. In him they perceived a connection with the “real” life of the streets, a world more or less closed to them by their celebrity. Mr. Peel’s tunes are primitive and repetitive, and thus ideal for street singing. His doggerel—which influenced the Lennons’ own writing for a time—is calculatedly outrageous and defiant, as in this verse from one of the songs on “The Pope Smokes Dope,” the album he recorded under the Lennons’ supervision:
More important, from the standpoint of their relations with the United States government, John and Yoko began soon after their arrival to involve themselves in American radical and anti-war politics. Their interest in political activity was not new. Before Yoko met John, she had staged a “Bag Peace Event” in London, standing in Trafalgar Square completely covered by a black bag and holding a sign with the word “Peace” on it. John, besides being “the clever Beatle” and “the writing Beatle” during the Four Mop Tops period, had been “the political Beatle” as well. It was he who made the notorious statement that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, and it was he who defied the wishes of the Beatles’ managers during the group’s final American tour, in 1966, by saying at a press conference that he did not like the war in Vietnam. He had also written “political” songs, including “Revolution No. 1,” “Give Peace a Chance,” “Power to the People,” and “Working Class Hero.” (At the Washington Monument, in November of 1969, Pete Seeger led two hundred and fifty thousand anti-war demonstrators in singing “Give Peace a Chance.”) After John and Yoko were married, in March of 1969, they pulled a series of what amounted to publicity stunts for peace. They celebrated their wedding with what they called a Bed Peace Event on the seventh floor of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. Reporters were ushered into the newlyweds’ room, where, to their bewilderment, they found nothing more sensational than John and Yoko sitting up in bed in their pajamas and talking about peace and brotherhood. They staged another bed-in in Toronto. At one point, the Lennons sent acorns to about fifty heads of state, asking that they be planted as a sign of faith in the future. (Golda Meir of Israel and Pierre Trudeau of Canada were among those who wrote back saying that they had planted their acorns.)
In New York, the Lennons’ political involvement became (in terms of the prevailing tactics of the radical movement) more conventional. Through Jerry Rubin, one of the Chicago Seven defendants, who telephoned them a few days after their arrival and soon became their friend, they met many representatives of the movement. They participated in a demonstration against the war in Vietnam in Bryant Park in April. They gave financial support to radicals and radical causes, including a jailed activist who needed bail money and a failing (and now defunct) underground newspaper, the New York Ace. They contributed a column to a new West Coast magazine, SunDance. In one of these columns, they wrote, “To the hard-hats who think that they don’t have the power to free themselves from the tyranny and suppression of the capitalists: It’s not their power or money that is controlling you, as is generally believed. Their power depends on your fear and apathy. . . . remember to vote.” Yoko wrote a short article, “The Feminization of Society,” which was published last February on the Op Ed page of the New York Times. “The ultimate goal of female liberation is not just an escape from male oppression,” she wrote. “How about liberating ourselves from our various mind trips such as ignorance, greed, masochism, fear of God and social conventions?”
For their first public concert performance in the United States, last December, the Lennons chose a huge “Free John Sinclair” rally at Crisler Arena, the largest hall at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. John Sinclair, a poet and a manager of various rock groups, is the founder of a commune in Ann Arbor called the Rainbow People’s Party, formerly known as the White Panther Party. He was in jail, having served two and a half years of a ten-year sentence for possessing two joints of marijuana. The many speakers at the rally included Bobby Seale, of the Black Panthers; Jerry Rubin; and another of the Chicago Seven defendants, Rennie Davis. Yoko told me recently that she believes that her and John’s troubles with the immigration authorities began with that rally. In the unlikely event that the Lennons’ political activity had escaped the government’s notice up until then, the Ann Arbor rally assuredly served to bring it to their attention. (As for John Sinclair, he was released from jail three days after the rally, but this was the result not of the Lennons’ visitation but of a new state law reducing the penalties for possession of marijuana.)
The Lennons get their information about the world primarily by watching television and talking with friends. They have not done much serious political reading. (One day, when I asked Yoko what books had influenced her political thinking, she replied, without much conviction, “Well, ‘Das Kapital’ was a big thing for me when I was young.”) John and Yoko are both radical pacifists, but beyond that it is pointless to try to characterize their views in ideological terms. The particular issues that interest them tend to arise from their own backgrounds and experiences. They are an international couple—Yoko was evacuated from Tokyo during the Second World War and was twelve when atomic bombs were dropped on her country—and they are interested in peace. They are an interracial couple, and they are interested in racial equality. John is partly of Irish descent, and he is indignant about the presence of English soldiers in Northern Ireland. He grew up a working-class kid speaking with an accent that was socially undesirable, and he feels strongly about class prejudice.
During their first six months in New York, the Lennons wrote about a dozen “political” songs, most of which appeared on an album, “Some Time in New York City,” last June. “The songs we wrote and sang are subjects we and most people talk about, and it was done in the tradition of minstrels (singing reporters) who sang about their times and what was happening,” John wrote in a SunDance column. The record includes a song about John Sinclair, a song about Angela Davis, and two songs each about prison, the Irish troubles, and women’s liberation. None of the songs are memorable, and there is something clumsy and dutiful about their topicality. One of them begins with these words, sung incongruously to a lullaby-like tune:
For the most part, John’s contributions to the album express anger and Yoko’s express hope. In “The Luck of the Irish,” John sings:
Yoko summarizes her political wisdom in the song “We’re All Water.” Here is a typical verse:
The Lennons’ visas were due to expire on February 29th of this year, and in January they hired a lawyer, Leon Wildes, to do what he could to help them stay in the United States. Mr. Wildes, who is thirty-nine, was president of the Association of Immigration and Nationality Lawyers in 1971. Normally, practicing immigration law is a matter of knowing how to handle the bureaucratic machinery; in contrast to the practice of civil-liberties law, or even of ordinary criminal law, it seldom involves confrontations. The Lennons wanted, initially, nothing more than a few additional months in the country. Mr. Wildes anticipated no trouble on that score, because a first six-month extension of a tourist visa is usually granted as a matter of course. But as the deadline approached, it became clear that there would be no extension. When Mr. Wildes telephoned Sol Marks, the director of the New York District of the Immigration Service, Mr. Marks told him that because of John’s old British conviction for possession of cannabis resin an extension would be out of the question. And on March 1st the Immigration Service gave the Lennons fifteen days to get out of the country.
That day was the beginning of a frantic week for John and Yoko, their lawyers, and the immigration authorities. On March 3rd, the Domestic Relations Court in Houston rendered its decision. Judge Solito gave temporary custody of Kyoko to her mother, and ordered the absent Mr. Cox to surrender the child. The Judge pronounced himself satisfied that Yoko was willing and able to provide a “suitable environment” for Kyoko and that John would “coöperate in every way possible, necessary, and advisable” in her “proper upbringing and education.” Finally, the Judge stipulated that Yoko’s custody of her daughter would have to be exercised “within the territorial limits of the United States of America.” This last provision made the prospect of having to leave the country far more agonizing to the Lennons, since their departure would mean the collapse—possibly for good—of their efforts to recover Kyoko.
On that same day, March 3rd, the Lennons petitioned the Immigration Service to change their administrative category from that of “nonimmigrant visitors” to that of “third-preference immigrant” visa applicants. The immigration law defines a third-preference immigrant as “an alien who is a member of the professions, or who because of his exceptional ability in the sciences or arts will substantially benefit prospectively the national economy, cultural interests or welfare of the United States.” (First-preference immigrants are the unmarried children of United States citizens, and second-preference immigrants are the spouses and unmarried children of permanent resident aliens. Third-preference immigrants rank ahead of the married children and the brothers and sisters of United States citizens, and ahead of refugees.) Mr. Wildes chose this bureaucratic stratagem for his clients because it offered a way of keeping them in the country longer than twelve days. Under normal Immigration Service procedures, a visitor whose third-preference petition is approved is permitted to stay until a visa number becomes available, at which point he formally applies for status as a permanent resident. Approval of the petitions seemed to Mr. Wildes a foregone conclusion. Getting permanent-residence status would be the hard part, since the immigration law specifically denies it to people convicted of violating “any law or regulation relating to the illicit possession of or traffic in narcotic drugs or marijuana,” and John’s cannabis-resin conviction seemed to fall into that category (although Mr. Wildes was prepared to argue otherwise). At any rate, the whole procedure was a way of buying time. Or so Mr. Wildes thought. But when he talked to Mr. Marks about it, Mr. Marks told him that because John was presumed to be ineligible for residence the usual practice would not apply to the Lennons, and they would have to leave on schedule. “In fourteen years of practicing immigration law, I’d never heard that theory,” Mr. Wildes told me later. “It was sheer tommyrot.”
Then, on March 6th, the Immigration Service suddenly lowered the boom. A trio of officers appeared at the door of the Lennons’ apartment and presented a letter from Mr. Marks. “On March 1, 1972, we advised you in writing that you were expected to effect your departure from the United States on or before March 15, 1972,” the letter said. “It is now understood that you have no intention of effecting your departure by that date. We are therefore revoking the privilege of voluntary departure as provided by existing regulations.” Along with the letter, the three officers delivered written orders directing the Lennons to appear at a hearing on March 16th, and to show cause there why they should not be deported. The orders also declared that the Lennons were in the United States “without authority.” The government seemed to be saying that the Lennons couldn’t legally stay in the country but they also couldn’t leave without disobeying a presumably legal order. (In psychiatry, this sort of conundrum is known as the double bind.)
From the government’s point of view, the show-cause orders had a flaw: they failed to mention that the Lennons had been given until March 15th to leave and that nine days of this time had still not elapsed. The point was made in Mr. Marks’s letter, but the letter was not a legal document. Someone at the Immigration Service noticed this omission, and the next day the three officers appeared again, with new show-cause orders. “They were falling all over themselves, they were so anxious to get rid of John and Yoko,” Mr. Wildes remarked to me later. “It was almost like the Keystone Kops.”
When I discussed the case with Mr. Marks, who is a vigorous man of fifty-nine and the son of immigrant parents himself, I asked him what had led him to conclude that the Lennons were not going to leave on time. “I talked to their counsel on the telephone, and he indicated that they were not planning to leave but to apply for resident visas,” he said. “I put the question directly to Mr. Wildes: ‘Are your clients planning to leave?’ And he said no. I thought it would be fruitless to wait for the end of that fifteen days.” Mr. Wildes recalled the conversation differently. “I told him I was advising the Lennons to apply for third-preference, but I didn’t say they weren’t planning to leave. They didn’t want to leave, of course, but they weren’t required to want to. Their intention merely had to be to comply with the order and leave within the time authorized, and not be deported. The third-preference petitions didn’t contradict that, because they would want those to protect their interests even if they were going back to England.”
The Lennons’ deportation hearing, which had been postponed for more than a month while Mr. Wildes unsuccessfully petitioned Mr. Marks to cancel it, finally got started on the morning of April 18th, in a small room on the fourteenth floor of the Immigration Service headquarters building, on lower West Broadway. The Lennons were dressed almost identically, in dark-blue suits, checked shirts, and nondescript ties. “We’re a pair,” their clothes seemed to say, “and it would be a shame to break us up.” John was pale and clean-shaven. His sandy hair, combed back instead of in the tousled Beatle cut, stuck up here and there in cowlicks. Yoko, tiny and wide-faced, sat beside him at a table facing the raised desk of the Special Inquiry Officer, Ira Fieldsteel. Mr. Fieldsteel, a mild-looking man with thinning gray hair and horn-rimmed glasses, is not, strictly speaking, a judge. But he wore black robes, and he looked like one.
The Lennons were rather less flamboyantly turned out than the two lawyers who sat flanking them. The one on Yoko’s left had a battered face. He wore a Norfolk-cut suit of shiny shantung, and his hair, black and wavy, was long enough to cover his collar. The one on John’s right had a smoother face, and he wore a more subdued, beige spring suit. His fair hair, streaked with gray, was a trifle shorter, but his tie was wide and bold, and his glasses were modishly wire-rimmed. John and Yoko whispered amicably with both of them, apparently without distinction. It developed that the dark lawyer was Vincent Schiano, chief trial attorney for the New York District of the Immigration Service, and the fair lawyer was Mr. Wildes. An observer with nothing to go on but a silent film of the proceedings could never have guessed which of them represented the Justice Department of the Nixon Administration and which the counterculture’s answer to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The hearing was short, and the lawyers did all the talking. Mr. Wildes presented a motion to terminate the proceedings, arguing that the Immigration Service had violated its own procedures and its mandate to assist in the reunion of families. Mr. Schiano disagreed. Mr. Wildes remarked that the government seemed to be repeating the error it had made in the case of another talented Englishman, Charlie Chaplin. Mr. Fieldsteel denied Mr. Wildes’ motion, and the hearing was adjourned until May 2nd.
A week after that first session of the hearing, Mr. Wildes dropped in at Immigration Service headquarters again to see what had become of the Lennons’ third-preference petitions. It customarily takes between thirty and sixty days for such petitions to be processed. Fifty-three days had passed, and he hadn’t heard a word about them. He inspected the Lennons’ files, and the petitions weren’t there. He insisted on seeing them. An hour later, they were produced, in sealed envelopes. Mr. Wildes has a certain way of stapling documents together, and it was evident to him that these hadn’t been touched, although they would ordinarily have been routed to the Department of Labor three weeks after they were submitted. Mr. Wildes telephoned the Labor Department and visited the office at Immigration headquarters that handles third-preference petitions. In neither place had anyone heard of the Lennons’ petitions
Mr. Wildes decided he had better do something. The deportation hearing was scheduled to reconvene at 8:45 a.m. on May 2nd—just a week away. He put together a complaint, and on May 1st he filed it in the federal district court. At four-twenty-five that afternoon, Judge Morris E. Lasker issued an injunction against the deportation hearing, and ordered Mr. Marks to show, at ten o’clock the next morning, why the hearing shouldn’t be stopped until the petitions were acted upon.
At ten minutes to ten the next morning, in a courtroom in the United States Courthouse in Foley Square, a government lawyer summoned Mr. Wildes to the bench and told him that Mr. Marks had just called to say that he had reached a decision. A few minutes later, Mr. Wildes was talking on the telephone with Mr. Marks. Later, Mr. Wildes told me how the conversation had gone: “I said, ‘Sol, what are you going to do?’ He said, ‘I’m approving the petitions.’ I said, ‘Sol, that’s wonderful, but how did you do it so quickly? The Labor Department people have to study the market, they have to call the unions—’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. We did all that by phone.’ ” The official notification that the petitions were approved arrived the next day—exactly sixty-one days after they had been submitted.
The deportation hearing resumed on May 12th. The hearing room—a larger one this time—was crowded. It had windows on two sides, looking out on the World Trade Center, the back of the old World-Telegram building, the Erie-Lackawanna piers, some punchy old warehouses, and the Hudson—a superb view, and the weather was clear. For John and Yoko, who love New York, it was a singular room in which to sit and listen to a discussion of whether they should be thrown out of the country. Mr. Fieldsteel adjusted a Dictaphone on his desk and began to talk to Mr. Wildes in a grave tone. At that moment, a powerful scent of flowers pervaded the room. The spectators—some fifty friends, reporters, and witnesses—smiled. John turned around in his chair and looked mock-sternly at the rows of people; Mr. Fieldsteel frowned and ordered the windows to be opened. The crisis passed. Later, it turned out that one of the spectators had spilled a small bottle of perfume.
This session was both about deporting the Lennons and about their applications to become permanent residents, for visa numbers in their new, third-preference category had lately become available. The government’s case against Yoko remained, throughout the hearing, a mystery. Mr. Schiano did, however, have a case to present against John. He introduced as government exhibits a certificate of John’s conviction for possession of cannabis resin and a copy of the British law under which he was convicted.
John’s conviction is not a particularly horrendous one, as these things go. In November of 1968, he pleaded guilty to the charge and paid a hundred-and-fifty-pound fine. The offense was a misdemeanor, not a felony, and British law permitted a conviction even if the accused had no idea he was in possession of a forbidden substance. By contrast, the narcotics laws of all fifty states, Canada, and Mexico all specify that a person must he proved to have known he possessed a drug before he can be convicted of possessing it—a point that Mr. Wildes stressed in his brief—and British law has since been similarly amended.
In the stipulation concerning “any law or regulation relating to” the possession of narcotics or marijuana, the language of the U.S. immigration law is unusually broad, and Mr. Wilde argued, both in the hearing and in his brief, that its meaning is more limited than it sounds. He argued that the purpose of the law is not to punish pot smokers but to keep traffickers out of the country, and he pointed to the 1964 Varga v. Rosenberg case as a precedent. In that decision, a United States District Court in California ruled that a Mexican resident of the United States was not subject to deportation even though he had been convicted of being under the influence of narcotics. The court held that the aim of Congress was “to eliminate traffic in narcotics as distinguished from use,” and that since all the narcotics in the defendant’s possession were in his bloodstream, he obviously could not sell them.
At the time of John’s arrest, he and Yoko were on a macrobiotic diet and were not taking drugs of any kind, even caffeine. They had been tipped off by newspaper friends to expect a bust, and they had given their house a thorough cleaning. Nevertheless, the arresting officer testified that he found the goods in John’s binocular case. John claimed afterward that the drug had been planted. Many people found this claim implausible, since John had never made a secret of the fact that he smoked marijuana from time to time, but subsequent events have tended to lend support to the notion that he was framed. The policeman in the case, a detective sergeant with a reputation for zealousness in finding drugs in the homes of musicians (he also arrested George Harrison, another Beatle, and Lionel Bart, composer of “Oliver!”), left the Metropolitan Police last July after Scotland Yard, in connection with an unrelated case, began an investigation of his division’s methods of collecting evidence. A month ago, the former policeman was charged with perjury and with conspiring “to pervert the course of justice.” In a letter that Mr. Wildes placed in the record, John’s London solicitor noted that he planned to seek a judicial expungement of the sentence once the investigation of the policeman was over. The solicitor added that he could have presented a good defense, but that it would have depended on Yoko’s testimony, and she was pregnant at the time and had a history of miscarriages. John decided to plead guilty, pay the fine, and be done with it. But Yoko miscarried anyway, and John, of course, is far from done with it
Mr. Wildes argued that in view of John’s apparent ignorance that he had a drug he could hardly have been trafficking in it. He also argued that the law, in specifying that possession be “illicit,” requires felonious possession, or at least possession with knowledge, and that to deport John for a conviction that would be void under American law would be to deny him the due process of law. Mr. Wildes also had an ingenious technical argument, and to buttress it he called Dr. Lester Grinspoon as his first outside witness at the hearing. Dr. Grinspoon, a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of the book “Marihuana Reconsidered,” knows as much as anyone about the hemp plant and the pharmacological products derived from it. He had a great deal to say—for instance, he described the harvesting of hashish by Nepalese farmers, who run through the hemp fields collecting the gummy substance on their naked or leather-clad bodies—but the nub of his testimony came when Mr. Wildes asked him, “Dr. Grinspoon, is cannabis resin marijuana? “
“No, cannabis resin is not marijuana,” Dr. Grinspoon replied.
“Is cannabis resin a narcotic drug?”
“No, cannabis resin is not a narcotic drug.”
Dr. Grinspoon went on to explain that marijuana is “the cut pistolate tops and small leaves, usually mixed with stems and seeds.” Cannabis resin, he explained, is the sticky exudate of the plant—the substance commonly known as hashish. Mr. Wildes argued that the immigration law, which contains no definition of either narcotic drugs or marijuana, should be narrowly interpreted. The law, he said, doesn’t talk about hashish or cannabis resin, only about narcotics and marijuana, so John’s conviction doesn’t it come under it. “Of course, it’s a technicality,” he said later to a group of reporters. “But they’re trying to deport my clients on a technicality.”
In support of the Lennons’ applications for visas as permanent residents, Mr. Wildes produced an impressive succession of character witnesses. The first was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas H. P. Hoving, a tall, sinuous man with a manner as aristocratic as it is possible to have and still be an American. “I first came across Mr. Lennon in 1966,” Mr. Hoving said. “I was partly responsible for bringing Mr. Lennon and the other members of the group the Beatles to Shea Stadium, of which, as Parks Commissioner, I was the landlord. I took my young daughter, who was, I think, put into a state of catatonia for several hours after she met them. Mr. Lennon’s fine basic character has remained unchanged over the years, but the artistic nature of his work has undergone a remarkable change for the better. Few people in the past ten years in any of the arts—painting, sculpture, architecture—have contributed as much as Mr. Lennon.” Mr. Hoving smiled faintly at Mr. Fieldsteel, and continued, “Artists throughout all time have acted in ways that those of us who are on the bureaucratic side of life may find a little strange.” Offhandedly, without providing any particulars, he mentioned the example of Georges de La Tour, and heads nodded sagely around the room. “I would say that if Mr. Lennon were a painting he would be hanging in the Metropolitan Museum benevolently on the wall,” Mr. Hoving concluded. “I am less familiar with Miss Ono, but I know that she has done a great deal of very serious and sincere artistic work.”
Dick Cavett, wearing a green sports coat, was next. “My opinion is that the Lennons are an important artistic presence in this country,” he said, and several spectators tittered, perhaps out of habit. “They seem to be a kind of stimulus to members of the artistic community. They are an inspiration not only to other artists but to young people—if I’m not rambling on too long—to young people in danger of falling into apathy.”
A young lawyer named Eric Schnapper, special assistant to the chairman of the Young Lawyers Section of the American Bar Association—“funded by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration of the Department of Justice,” he noted pointedly—testified that the Lennons had offered to play a series of college benefits for his organization.
James Harithas, big and lanky, the director of the Everson Museum, said he “would like and absolutely need their help and advice for at least a two-year period” in connection with a series of community projects growing out of Yoko’s retrospective.
“I first met Yoko in 1961 or so,” said Norman Seaman, a short, red-bearded man who is a theatrical and concert producer. “Some said she belonged in an insane asylum, others praised her depth of imagination. I found her a person of unusually deep humanity. If her present troubles were written down, it would be a real tearjerker, sort of a Stella Dallas story—a woman looking for her child, being cross-examined in a courtroom as to her right to stay with her husband.” Mr. Wildes interrupted to ask Mr. Seaman’s impression of the Lennons’ life style, and Mr. Seaman said, “I would say that they’re almost square. They get up and they eat and they go to work. They work harder and longer than most people.”
Kenneth Dewey, a rangy artist with a magnificent beard and a bald head, presented a sheaf of petitions opposing the deportation of the Lennons. The petitions had been circulated by the National Committee for John and Yoko (of which Mr. Dewey was chairman until his death, last August, in an airplane crash). The committee, started by a group of artist friends of Yoko’s, had acquired the support of scores of prominent artists, curators, gallery owners, art critics, writers, poets, musicians, and actors. The artists included Joseph Cornell, Willem de Kooning, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, and Jack Tworkov; the writers, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and the late Edmund Wilson; the poets, Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Stanley Kunitz, May Sarton, Karl Shapiro, W. D. Snodgrass, and James Wright; the musicians, David Amram, Leonard Bernstein, Ornette Coleman, Bob Dylan, George Kleinsinger, Nina Simone, and Virgil Thomson; the actors, Fred Astaire, Claire Bloom, Diahann Carroll, Tony Curtis, Ben Gazzara, and Jack Lemmon.
Besides the petitions, the committee’s two favorite pieces of paper are a telegram to the Immigration Service from Leonard Woodcock, the president of the United Auto Workers, and a remarkable statement issued by the American Center of P.E.N., the world association of poets, playwrights, essayists, editors, and novelists. Mr. Woodcock’s telegram begins, “It would be an outrage and a tragedy for this country if John Lennon and Yoko Ono are deported.” The P.E.N. statement, which was written by Allen Ginsberg, is as follows:
After Mr. Dewey had stepped down from the witness chair, Mr. Schiano shook his head exasperatedly and said, “Look. The government could produce lists of people who have written in, too, from a different point of view. Let’s keep this a trial, not an election.”
The last character witness for the Lennons was Allen Klein, their business manager, a gruff New Yorker who looks like a foreshortened prizefighter. “The Lennons have extensive holdings in the U.S.,” he said. “Their businesses do an annual gross business of fifty million dollars. A hundred to a hundred and fifty families depend on them for their livelihood. The economic benefits to this country are great and would be greater if they were allowed to live here and watch over their interests.” Mr. Klein, who is not normally given to tender sentiments, grew reflective. “To separate this couple, I think, is not really human,” he said. “That woman who stands there in the harbor with her torch would not want to separate this type of people.”
The hearing was adjourned until May 17th, and the Lennons held a brief news conference. It took place, oddly, in the grubby office of the man charged with prosecuting the case against them, Mr. Schiano, who stood behind his desk, smiling benevolently throughout.
“What will you do if you’re deported and Yoko isn’t?” a reporter asked John.
“I’ll hover in a helicopter ten feet off the ground, or in a boat paddling in the Hudson,” he said.
Someone asked why they didn’t flood the country with leaflets with Kyoko’s picture on them, and John said, “We’re wary of asking for public help. There are a lot of cranks, and we don’t want to put her in a precarious position. We get a lot of crank calls as it is, and, of course, we have to follow them all up. It’s not a federal case, so we can’t call in the F.B.I. People think we’re not doing anything about Kyoko because they read about us doing other things, but rest assured that ninety per cent of our time and energy is spent looking for her.”
“Would you choose to stay here even if there were no problem with Kyoko?” another reporter asked.
“I would like to stay in America, yes,” John said. “Yoko was brought up and educated here, and she’s made a convert of me. New York is like Paris in the old days. I always used to dream about van Gogh and everybody being there together. Now everyone’s in New York. I love a lot of places, like France, but New York is more like Liverpool. Even the Brooklyn accent is like Liverpudlian-‘cawfee.’ New York and Liverpool are both full of tough people. They’re both near the water. I’ll go back home when I’m eighty, to Cornwall, maybe, or Wales. We all go home to die, like elephants. But I’d like to spend a few decades around the world first.”
“Would you bring Kyoko up as an American?”
“I would like her to become an international person,” Yoko said. “The best world is world of no passports, no visas. I don’t hope to bring her up as a fanatic nationalist, if that’s what you mean.”
“John, would you want to become an American citizen?”
“Citizen, citizen, it’s a piece of paper. People are people, wherever. It’s all red, white, and blue anyway, isn’t it?”
At the third and final session of the hearing, five days later, the only witnesses were John and Yoko. Holding hands and looking rather wan, they again sat between the contending lawyers. Mr. Fieldsteel seemed more relaxed and less stern. “I know it’s not a big matter,” he said, smiling, “but the fees have to be paid on these visa applications. Twenty-five dollars each, please.”
Mr. Wildes fired off two more Establishmentarian salvos, in the form of a letter from Mayor Lindsay and an affidavit from William David Ormsby-Gore, Lord Harlech, former British Ambassador to the United States. Mayor Lindsay’s letter, addressed to Raymond F. Farrell, the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in Washington, noted that the Lennons “have personally told me of their love for New York City and that they wish to make it their home,” and continued, “The only question which is raised against these people is that they do speak out with strong and critical voices on major issues of the day. If this is the motive underlying the unusual and harsh action taken by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, then it is an attempt to silence Constitutionally protected First Amendment rights.” Lord Harlech’s deposition was nothing if not lordly. “It may be that there is a theory that no danger arises for the United States of America if someone resides there for six months but that the danger does arise if he stays for seven months or longer,” he wrote. “This argument is so obviously ludicrous that I make no further comment on it. . . . As a life-long friend of the United States of America, I reject the suggestion that the most powerful democratic country in the world whose whole constitution is based on individual freedom and human rights could believe for one moment that it might be subverted by the presence of a single young artist.”
John took the stand, and Mr. Wildes’ direct examination began in a traditional fashion. “Mr. Lennon,” he asked, “have you ever been a member of the Communist Party or of any group whose purpose may be to overthrow the government?”
“No,” said John Lennon.
“Are there any activities for which your continued presence or continued joint presence in this country is required?”
“There are many, from recording talent discovered here, to Yoko’s own art work, to a few universities that want us to go and lecture on music and art and things generally. Our most important activity is looking for Kyoko. That’s what we’re really doing, and that’s what we have planned until we find her.”
Mr. Fieldsteel asked John whether he would leave the country voluntarily if given that opportunity. “Well, I wouldn’t do anything that wasn’t legal,” he said, and glanced at his lawyer. “I wouldn’t do anything he didn’t advise me to do.” Then he turned back to Mr. Fieldsteel. He talked briefly about the search for Kyoko, and he said, “I don’t know if there’s any mercy to plead for, because we are not in a federal court, but if there is any, I’d like it, please, for both of us and our child.”
In his cross-examination, Mr. Schiano asked John a series of question about his business interests and tax arrangements, and it quickly became plain that John’ s grasp of them was rather shaky. “I own one-fourth of Apple,” he said firmly, but beyond that he grew vague. “I don’t know—it’s very complicated. I think it all has to go to England first. Whatever it is, I’ve just got lawyers that do it. I sign things sometimes. . . . Some of Apple’s lawyers don’t understand it themselves.”
“Would you have any objection if the federal government took a hand in trying to find Kyoko?” Mr. Schiano asked.
“All we ask is that whatever be done be done quietly, without fanfare. We’re frightened of her becoming a famous child.”
Yoko followed her husband to the stand, and, after denying membership in the Communist Party, said, in her faintly singsong voice, which is like that of a small, solemn girl, that her aunt and several of her cousins as well as her daughter are American citizens. Mr. Wildes asked her to talk about Kyoko’s disappearance, and she said, “I was afraid that if I made this incident public it would affect my child later, and hurt her. I only did it after looking for her for two years. I still feel if I had any choice about it I would never have done anything to make it public. It’s going to hurt her later to know her parents had fought over her in court.” Yoko’s eyes filled with tears. “I think my ex-husband took my daughter away because she was developing a close relationship with my husband, John Lennon,” she said. “Without my husband’s support and efforts to console me, I could not carry on. We have followed all the leads. We have hired private detectives. But as soon as we arrived someplace, because we are famous everybody would know we were there and my ex-husband would go away again. The ironical thing is that the position we are in, which is considered to be a powerful position, is working against us.”
Mr. Fieldsteel asked Yoko whether she would still want to be a permanent resident of the United States if John’s application should be denied. “You’re asking me to choose between my husband and my child,” she said. “I don’t think you can ask any human being to do such a thing.”
The hearing ended, the Lennons disappeared briefly to be fingerprinted for their visa applications, and the flock of reporters waited for them in Mr. Schiano’s office. Mr. Schiano was not trying particularly hard to conceal his lack of enthusiasm for deporting the Lennons—he is, he said, another Beatle fan among millions—but, as the reporters idly asked him questions to pass the time, he grew a trifle uncomfortable. Someone asked him if he thought it was really such a good idea to kick John Lennon out of the country, and he said, “What I think isn’t the point. I feel that the law bars him from becoming a permanent resident. The law allows no discretion at this point, and that’s it. Even if we loved the Lennons, we couldn’t do anything about that.”
“Maybe the law should be changed, then,” a reporter suggested.
“Well, a bill was introduced in Congress to give us the right to choose between the good guys and the bad guys on something like this. I mean, if we know a guy is a big drug dealer but the only conviction on his record is for possession of marijuana, we ought to be able to deport him. But if it’s just a kid who got himself busted for a joint, that’s something different.”
The reporters asked more questions, and finally Mr. Schiano mumbled, as if to himself, “You know the old saying—sometimes the best guarantee of civil liberties is the inefficiency of government.” Then he said, “I think I’d better stop talking. I’m still healing from some old wounds. I’ve had to sue for every promotion I’ve gotten.”
The Lennons entered, and Mr. Schiano looked relieved. “Tell you what,” he said to John. “I’ll go to Tittenhurst”—Tittenhurst is the Lennons’ country house in England—“and you take my job.”
“Maybe you got a deal there,” said John.
On July 1st, Leon Wildes filed a fourteen-thousand-word brief in behalf of John and Yoko. Mr. Schiano, who decided to wait for the transcript of the hearings to be typed, did not submit the government’s brief until about three weeks ago. It was short—two thousand words—and was limited to the points that the hearing officer, Mr. Fieldsteel, is empowered by the law to decide. Mr. Schiano devoted most of his brief to John’s drug conviction. He contended that to overlook it because it might not be acceptable under American law would clog the immigration-hearing system by throwing every foreign conviction into question on one basis or another, and he argued that the Narcotics Control Act’s definition of marijuana, which includes cannabis resin, or hashish, is the one that applies. “Marijuana has become the universal term in the United States for the plant known as Cannabis sativa,” he wrote. “To say that, therefore, Congress intended to bar only possession of the plant Cannabis sativa (and not its parts or extracts) is to say that Congress intended only to bar possession of a plant which grows four to sixteen feet in height, and which, by itself, causes injury only by hitting someone with it.”
Mr. Wildes will have an opportunity to answer the government’s brief, and Mr. Fieldsteel will probably render his decision sometime around the first of February. It is likely that Yoko’s application for permanent residence will be approved; even Mr. Marks, the New York District director of the Immigration Service, is now not so sure it was a good idea to try to deport her. “We admit we maybe acted a bit hastily on that one,” he told me recently. “But they wanted to ride together.” If John loses—and he probably will, though his chances are better than they were at the start—Mr. Wildes will take his case to the Board of Immigration Appeals, in Washington, and, if necessary, to the federal courts. The appeals process could take years, and as long as it continues, John will be obliged to remain in the United States if he wants to preserve his chances of eventual success. It could easily happen that the government’s attempt to deport John Lennon will have the paradoxical effect of forcing him to remain in this country longer and more continuously than he otherwise might have.
In the six and a half months since the deportation hearing ended, Anthony Cox, his wife, and the daughter of his marriage to Yoko have still not turned up. George P. Kendall, Mr. Cox’s father-in-law, told me last week that he and Mrs. Kendall have not seen them since last Christmas Eve and do not know where they are. The Kendalls received a letter from their daughter in February and another in September, both postmarked Houston and both assuring them that she, her husband, and Kyoko (whom the Coxes now call Rosemary) were well and happy. “Tony is obsessed with the fear that the Lennons would not return the child,” Mr. Kendall said. “He has dedicated his life to what he believes is right for the safety of that child.”
When Yoko and I discussed her feelings about being separated from her daughter, she said, “I was never a possessive mother. I just want to be given a chance to help Kyoko’s situation. I think she needs to know that she’s wanted by both parents. Through the pain of this experience, I have started to go back to what I believed in before I had my own child, which is that all children belong to all of us. The exclusive ownership of children is connected with nationalism and capitalism and bad things like that. A child is brought up with family pride and taught to believe it’s different and better, when really it’s not. I used to think it would be nice if all people interested in bringing up children would register, and when a child is born it would be given three sets of parents of all different kinds—maybe a politician, a farmer, and a fisherman—and it could always change them. I’m thinking that way now again.”
Yoko said that her private detectives had been unable to find Kyoko, but she seemed certain that the child was with her father and was in good health. I asked her what she would do if she did locate Kyoko, and she said, “I certainly would not send someone to sneak her away. I would ask someone both Tony and I respect—Dick Gregory, perhaps—to go and talk with him and try to work out a better situation. I know that Tony is very close to her, and I’m not about to try to cut that relationship off.”
I asked Yoko why she had not filed a charge of kidnapping against Mr. Cox or tried in some other way to get the assistance of the law-enforcement authorities in recovering her child. “Kyoko has had enough traumatic experiences without the police coming to grab her father,” she said. “Remember, I once before pushed this to the point where Tony went to jail. I feel guilty about that now, because it didn’t help, and it upset Kyoko very much. And please remember, in the story of Solomon it was the real mother who gave up her child rather than let it be cut in half.”
The government’s determination to deport the Lennons has badly frightened them, and they have largely withdrawn from political activity. They would have liked to help in the McGovern campaign—as another foreigner, Melina Mercouri, actually did—but they did not want to anger the Administration any more than necessary. They are convinced that they are being watched, and their telephones tapped, by government agents, and they are afraid of the consequences of saying or doing anything controversial. Their second concert performance of their current stay, at Madison Square Garden on August 30th, was a benefit to raise money for the care of mentally retarded children.
It is possible, of course, that the government’s treatment of the Lennons has been motivated solely by a desire to enforce the law and protect the American public from drugs. Mr. Marks told me that the government’s course of action was determined by him, and that his superiors in Washington approved but did not dictate his decisions. In theory, Mr. Marks had the authority to select options other than the hard line that was chosen. He could, for example, have recommended the renewal of the Lennons’ visitor’s visas; he could have marked their cases “nonpriority”—a common practice in the overburdened Immigration Service—thereby effectively holding up action on them; or he could have cancelled the deportation proceedings, on the ground that they were endangering the unity of a family, an action he has had the nominal statutory authority to take at any time. Immigration lawyers who have worked with Mr. Marks in the past think that his approach to the Lennons’ case has been uncharacteristic of him, and it is at least open to question whether he would have proceeded in quite the way he did without some guidance from his superiors in the Department of Justice and the Nixon Administration. The Lennons’ deportation case may be some sort of wildly inefficient political persecution, or it may be a simple law-enforcement case or just a routine bureaucratic nightmare. Whatever it is, John and Yoko are thinking twice before going on any more demonstrations. ♦
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