When John Lennon thought he was Robin Hood

New York musician David Peel rings up the Greenwich Village apartment of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. She answers. After exchanging standard greetings, Ono seems to crumble.

Yoko Ono: People are saying that I’m the one who broke up the Beatles, you know? When I was pregnant, I got letters that said, “I hope your baby dies.” And they sent me a rag doll with a bunch of needles stuck in it, in its eyes, in its mouth, in its nose. When I walk down the street with John, they come up to me and say, “you’re ugly.” They pull my hair and hit me in the head.

David Peel: That happened in England?

Yoko Ono: Yes, yes, in England. I had three spontaneous abortions during that time.

David Peel: Oh my God, Yoko, I can’t believe it.

That 1971 conversation was never made public, until being included in the documentary One to One: John & Yoko, which debuted at the recent Venice Film Festival, will be shown at the BFI London Film Festival in mid-October and is awaiting a commercial release date. What is striking about the movie, which addresses a well-known subject (the English press enthusiastically piled onto the public lynching of Ono at the time, as period newspaper clippings make clear) is the timbre of the voices it captures, their indignation, their anguish, and the look it provides at a moment that was as socially and politically turbulent as it was musically innovative.

In 1971, the Beatles having broken up a few years before, Lennon and Ono (who were married in 1969) rented a small apartment on Bank Street in the bohemian New York neighborhood of Greenwich Village. They were fleeing from a toxic atmosphere in England. She was the favorite scapegoat of the Liverpool quartet’s fan legion, whose most virulent faction held the Japanese artist responsible for the Beatles having gone their separate ways. The couple wanted to live more peacefully, walk the city streets incognito, to no longer receive threats and be the target of assaults. Paradoxically, they would face even tougher challenges in New York. So says British writer Philip Norman, one of the top experts on the Beatles, in his voluminous Paul McCartney: The Biography. “John and Yoko had moved to New York in search of refuge from the incessant mistreatment and jokes they suffered in Great Britain. Instead, they became decorative figures of extreme left politics that permeated rock culture in the United States at the time and, in so doing, became more conspicuous and controversial than ever.”

Lennon justified their decision to pick a simple apartment at a time when he had no lack of money in an interview he gave to a U.S. TV channel days after their arrival in Manhattan: “I’ve always identified with the working class [though he was raised in the conservative bourgeoisie home of his aunt Mimi]. But I bought a mansion outside London, an immense property. It had everything. Yoko talked to me about getting rid of my possessions and freeing my mind. She said, ‘Look at you, you’re rich and you don’t know what life is.’ And she convinced me. We changed it all for two small rooms in the Village. And I’m happy. I feel like a student again. We’re like a pair of newlyweds.”

The beginning of the 1970s couldn’t have been more turbulent and exciting in the United States: the streets burned with anti-Vietnam War protests, civil rights demonstrations proliferated, sexual liberation movements marched, feminists looked to overturn the patriarchy and fear of nuclear war between the USSR and the United States simmered. It was all seasoned with a healthy sprinkle of LSD and marijuana. Poets, political agitators, musicians, dealers, hustlers and leftist leaders passed through Lennon and Ono’s tiny flat, including big names like Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, John Sinclair and A. J. Weberman.

The film captures one megalomaniacal conversation between Lennon and his slimy manager, Allen Klein, in which the former Beatle proposes hiring lawyers and paying bails to free Black protestors arrested in anti-racist riots. “It’s like being Robin Hood, fucking great. Or Jesse James,” Lennon exults. In the end, the plan didn’t come together.

Some came to the couple’s home out of curiosity, to see a rock star living in a humble abode. Others, with the intention of using Lennon to their own ends. He was receptive, and signed up for nearly everything with Ono’s support. The pair split their time between supporting pacifist political causes and compulsively watching the television they set up at the foot of their bed. The series The Waltons, football, laundry detergent ads featuring mothers freaking out over stains on their daughters’ dresses, Sonny and Cher on their Comedy Hour — and Nixon, who was about the be re-elected, over the voluminous complaint of protestors. Lennon enjoyed being the figurehead for the intense American left, while Ono inaugurated exhibitions in hip galleries that featured a half-eaten apple in a glass case. They always went to interviews and social gatherings as a duo. He would talk a lot and she would listen, her face expressionless. Sometimes, she would approach him and whisper something in his ear. Paul McCartney was no stranger to this tag team dynamic — he’d borne the brunt of it during the last years of the Beatles.

Lennon had already released influential solo albums, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) and Imagine (1971). The latter included the vituperative How Do You Sleep, the song in which he held forth against McCartney: “You live with straights who tell you, you was king / The only thing you done was yesterday / And since you’ve gone you’re just another day.” Among the personalities who visited the couple’s rumpled apartment was McCartney himself. His visit took place in 1972, signaling the reconciliation of two men who had staged the biggest revolution in the history of pop. Two years had gone by since the acrimonious Beatles breakup, enough time for the two to stop acting like bratty little kids and hurling abuse at each other in their songs. They made peace, though they’d never be close again.

That meeting doesn’t figure in the new documentary directed by Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards. But that doesn’t mean One to One is without allure. Even those immune to Beatlemania will find its peek into the social context of the time interesting. Those looking for musical surprises will be delighted by the excellent audio from Lennon and Ono’s Madison Square Garden fundraiser for the Willowbrook State School for children with disabilities, featuring Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack, whose sound was remixed by Sean Lennon for the film. Some will recognize the images from the August 30, 1972 concert (it was even made into a 1986 album, Live in New York City), but hearing Mother reworked with today’s technological improvements is a real treat.

We now know that the couple’s phones were tapped during this time. Their progressive ideals had rendered them a threat to the shadowy Nixon administration and the CIA had them under surveillance. There was even an attempted deportation of Lennon. Their phone line rings, again. This time it’s Jim Keltner, one of the most-sought-after session drummers. He warns Lennon, “There are people who can cause you harm because of your political positions.” “They want to kill me?” asks Lennon. The rock star is initially unconcerned: “Um, I’m still an artist, you know, an artist of the revolution.” But the threat sunk in, and Lennon agreed, on the advice of his lawyer, to tone down his complaints against the U.S. government. In 1972, Nixon was re-elected. A year and a half later, the president was forced to resign over the Watergate scandal. Lennon and Ono ended their 18-month stay in the tiny Village apartment and Lennon embarked on a decadent period in Los Angeles with his lover May Pang and his gang of drug-loving musician friends: Keith Moon, Harry Nilson and his fellow former Beatle, Ringo Starr. In 1975, the American government reversed the deportation order for Lennon, who had already ended his Californian bender and was back in the arms of Ono.

Sean was born, and his father stepped back from music for five years to focus, according to Lennon, “on raising my son.” In February 1979, the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious died from an overdose in a house on Bank Street. On November 17, 1980, Lennon returned to music with the album Double Fantasy, a collaboration with Ono. Less than a month later, on December 8, Mark David Chapman shot Lennon dead. Hours before, the singer had autographed Chapman’s copy of Double Fantasy.

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