Some good local news, for a change: John Lennon and his wife and co‑worker, Yoko Ono, have become, for most practical purposes, New Yorkers. They have been living here more or less continuously for the past six months; they have rented a studio in the West Village to live in and a loft in SoHo to work in; they have been observed doing New Yorkish things, such as riding their bicycles in the Park, going to the movies in the middle of the night, and picking up the Sunday papers in Sheridan Square. So far, they have not been heard to complain that the city is unlivable. When that happens, we’ll know that they’re here to stay.
On a recent Saturday, we went down to the West Village to see for ourself how they are getting along in their new home. A long-haired retainer opened the door and steered us toward a curtain in the rear. We ducked through it, into what is surely one of the pleasantest rooms in town. It is a studio in the old, romantic way—high-ceilinged, with serrated skylights, trees outside the windows, and a cast-iron circular stairway, painted muddy green, leading to the roof. The walls are beige, trimmed in the same muddy green. There was a relaxed dishevelment—piles of clothing, electronic equipment, a guitar, magazines in English and Japanese. The only uncluttered horizontal surface was a bed, big and solid, which jutted into the room like the stage in a theatre-in-the-round. A television set, picture on, sound off, perched at the foot—a prompter’s box. John Lennon, wearing jeans and a blue tank top, sat cross-legged on the bed. He was a trifle smaller than we had expected, his skin was ruddier, his hair was fairer, but his face was as familiar as an old friend’s. Yoko, dressed in green, lounged beside him. We pulled up a chair.
“Why did you choose New York to live in?” we asked.
“We love it, and it’s the center of our world,” John said.
“It’s the first international city, race-wise, if you think about it,” Yoko said. “It has more Jews than Tel Aviv.”
“And more Irish than Dublin,” John said.
“And blacks, and Chinese, and Japanese, and they’re all living pretty well together,” Yoko said. “Right now there’s fantastic pessimism, both in the art world and in the general society. Even the most intelligent people in New York are saying, ‘Oh, nothing is happening in New York. It’s boring. Let’s all go to the West Coast.’ That was the general tenor when we got here. We’re sort of trying to change the wind to a more positive wind.”
“I think all of us went through a big depression in the last year and a half, all over the world,” John said. “We think there’s something in the air that’s going to pick us all up again. You know, New York is a fantastic place. Yoko is a New Yorker. She spent fifteen years here before she met me, and she used to go on about New York to me all the time, but I had never really seen it. I was overwhelmed by America in the early days when the Beatles were here, because we were all brought up on Americana. Britain is the fifty-ninth state, or whatever, and America was the mother country of the whole culture. There’s an unbelievably creative atmosphere on this little island of Manhattan. Like they say, there just isn’t anything you can’t get in New York.”
“It’s a very rich island,” Yoko said solemnly.
“It has everything you could possibly want, night and day. That’s what I can’t stand about England and Europe: it closes down, unless you go to Hamburg or Amsterdam for the night-club scene, which I don’t enjoy. But New York never sleeps.”
“In a way, it’s better to be poor in New York than rich in Spain or England,” John said.
“Exactly, exactly,” Yoko said. “I was an artist cum waitress cum lecturer in New York, and a superintendent also.”
“She was the superintendent of the building Jerry Rubin’s living in now,” John said. “Jerry took us to see it, and it turned out to be a place where Yoko was superintendent ten years ago.”
“I was fired,” Yoko said, and she laughed. “One night, I was having a concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, and I forgot to turn the incinerator on. All the garbage was stuck, and two days later I burned it, and the smoke was everywhere, and the Fire Department came, and I was fired. I was a waitress and a cook in a macrobiotic restaurant—the Paradox. The critics would come to interview me about my concerts.”
“She’d serve ’em macro and then sit down with ’em and talk about her art,” John said.
“I thought I was a very rich person then, because this city has that quality, that even a waitress can feel rich about it,” Yoko said. “There’s no set thing about your fate here. Your fate is what you create in this city.”
We said that the talk of riches reminded us of a recent song of John’s, “Imagine,” which asks the listener, among other things, to “imagine no possessions.”
“I wish ‘Imagine’ would come true,” John said. “I’ve been listening to it myself, because I get an objective view after, and I was imagining. I began to think: I don’t want that big house we built for ourselves in England. I don’t want the bother of owning all these big houses and big cars, even though our company, Apple, pays for it all. All structures and buildings and everything I own will be dissolved and got rid of. I’ll cash in my chips, and anything that’s left I’ll make the best use of. Yoko is a three-tatami woman, and she’s been working on me to get rid of this possessions complex, which is something that happens to people who were poor like myself—not starving but poor.”
We asked Yoko about her three tatami, and she said, “One tatami is the length and width of a person lying down. A friend of mine in Tokyo says that in today’s society, with its overpopulation, the natural space that a person can acquire without fighting or making unnatural efforts is three tatami—one for himself to lie down in, a second for his companion, and a third for them both to breathe in. There is a kind of poverty where you have an excess of things, and all your energy is directed toward getting and keeping them. John was poor, and it was natural for him to strive for wealth, but I come from a background of excessiveness. It was very natural for me to live in New York in a bohemian way, because I was trying to get away from that.”
John was still preoccupied with his possessions. “It’s clogging my mind just to think about what amount of gear I have in England. All my books and possessions. Walls full of books I’ve collected all my life. I have a list this thick of the things I have in Ascot, and I’m going to tick off the things I really want, really need. The rest goes to libraries or prisons—the whole damn lot. I might keep my rock-and-roll collection, but even that I’m thinking about.”
“Everything you’ve got in here looks like something you use,” we said.
“Yes, it’s very casual,” Yoko said. “If we lost everything in here, we might be annoyed, but not to the point where it would affect our health. I like the idea of everything being transient, so that all that is with me is somebody I love and myself.”
We asked the Lennons how they liked their new neighborhood, and Yoko said, “It’s so good! It’s like a quaint little town.”
“Yes, it’s like a little Welsh village, with Jones the Fish and Jones the Milk, and everybody seems to know everybody,” John said.
“People don’t grab us when we walk in the Village,” Yoko said. “They sort of smile from a distance, which is nice.”
“We stand out more in Britain than in America as a mixed-marriage couple,” John said. “Although there is race hatred in America, you see more different-colored people in America than in Britain.”
“Even the white people are different colors here,” we said.
“Yes, there are all shades, all different kinds of descent,” he said. “In England, everybody south of Calais is a ‘wog,’ and that includes the French and the Italians.”
“John has a New York temperament in his work,” Yoko said. “Liverpool is very much like New York, for an English city.”
“Liverpool is the port where the Irish got on the boat to come over here, and the same for the Jews and the blacks,” John said. “The slaves were brought to Liverpool and then shipped out to America. On the river front in Liverpool you can still see the rings in the side where they were chained up. We got the records—the blues and the rock—right off the boats, and that’s why we were advanced musically. In Liverpool, when you stood on the edge of the water you knew the next place was America.”
The sun was setting, and the television set glowed more brightly. On the screen, a gigantic lizard was crunching Times Square underfoot. “Do you like watching television without the sound?” we asked.
“TV to me is like what the fireplace used to be,” John said. “You always get these Surreal things happening. I used to watch the fire as a child, but since they took the fire away from us, I’ve decided that TV is it. It’s like the window—only this picture continually changes. You’ll see China and the moon, all in ten minutes. You’ll see real, Surreal, strange, psychedelic—everything.”
We got up to go, and said goodbye to Yoko. John walked us to the door, peered out cautiously, and came out on the stoop with us for a moment. “Everywhere’s somewhere, and everywhere’s the same, really, and wherever you are is where it’s at,” he said. “But it’s more so in New York. It does have sugar on it, and I’ve got a sweet tooth.” ♦
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