On the way home our plane stopped off in Rome where we had lunch. Wouldn’t it be fun to finish the day with dinner in London, after breakfast in Greece and lunch in Rome? We laughed. “Let’s get John to join us.” Alex suggested I ring him to let him know what time we would be back.
I spoke to him briefly. “Hi, darling, I’ll be home soon. Can’t wait to see you.”
John’s reply sounded normal: “Fine, see you later.”
<…>
We arrived at four in the afternoon and immediately I knew something was wrong: the porch light was on, the curtains were still drawn and everything was silent.
<…>
John and Yoko were sitting on the floor, cross-legged and facing each other, beside a table covered with dirty dishes. They were wearing the terry-cloth robes we kept in the poolhouse, so I imagined they had been for a swim. John was facing me. He looked at me, expressionless, and said, “Oh, hi.” Yoko didn’t turn around.
I blurted out the only thing I could think of: “We were all looking forward to dinner in London after lunch in Rome and breakfast in Greece. Would you like to come?”
The stupidity of that question has haunted me ever since.
Confronted by my husband and his lover—wearing my dressing-gown—behaving as though I was an intruder, all I could do was carry on as if everything were normal. In fact I was in shock, operating on autopilot. I had no idea how to react. It was clear that they had arranged for me to find them like that and the cruelty of John’s betrayal was hard to absorb. The intimacy between them was daunting. I could feel a wall round them that I could not penetrate. In my worst nightmares about Yoko I had not imagined anything like this.
As I stood in the doorway, rooted to the spot in shock and pain, John said, indifferently, “No, thanks.”
I turned and fled.
(John by Cynthia Lennon, 2005)
As the meeting was drawing to a weary close, John, not this day with Yoko, who hadn’t seemed particularly connected with what was going on, said he wanted to play us a tape he and Yoko had made. He got up and put the cassette into the tape machine and stood beside it as we listened. The soft murmuring voices did not at first signal their purpose. It was a man and a woman but hard to hear, the microphone having been at a distance. I wondered if the lack of clarity was the point. Were we even meant to understand what was going on, was it a kind of artwork where we would not be able to put the voices into a context, and was context important? I felt perhaps this was something John and Yoko were examining. But then, after a few minutes, it became clear. John and Yoko were making love, with endearments, giggles, heavy breathing, both real and satirical, and the occasional more direct sounds of pleasure reaching for climax, all recorded by the faraway microphone. But there was something innocent about it too, as though they were engaged in a sweet serious game. John clicked the off button and turned again to look toward the table, his eyebrows quizzical above his round glasses, seemingly genuinely curious about what reaction his little tape would elicit. However often they’d shared small rooms in Hamburg, whatever they knew of each other’s love and sex lives, this tape seemed to have stopped the other three cold. Perhaps it touched a reserve of residual Northern reticence. After a palpable silence, Paul said, “Well, that’s an interesting one.” The others muttered something and the meeting was over.
(Michael Lindsay-Hogg (filmmaker), Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond, 2011)
Klein asked John to wait until the contracts were finalized before he started talk that the Beatles were disbanding. But that didn’t keep John from enjoying the satisfaction of telling Paul. Shortly after John’s return from Toronto, he demanded a meeting at Apple. Paul arrived, his usual magnanimous self, full of plans for new Beatles projects. But no matter what Paul suggested, John kept saying, “No, I don’t want to do that,” or “No, I’m not interested.” The discussion finally dissolved into a mean argument, which Paul finally recovered from by launching into one of his Beatle-pep talks, one of those “Toppermost of the Poppermost” things.
“When everything is said and done,” he summed up, “we’re still the Beatles, aren’t we?”
“Aw fuck,” John said, “I ain’t no Beatle.”
Paul wouldn’t hear it. “Of course you are—”
“I’m not!” John shouted, “Don’t you understand? It’s over! Over! I want a divorce, just like the divorce I got from Cynthia! Can’t you get it through your bloody head?”
The meeting ended shortly after with John rushing down the stairs, Yoko right behind him, shouting, “It’s over! Finished!”
Still, John said nothing to the press, and when he and Yoko left Savile Row that afternoon in their white Rolls-Royce, Paul still somehow believed that John would calm down and there would always be the Beatles.
(The Love You Make by Peter Brown, 1983)
Everybody was dumbfounded [at the election results]…
<…>
So here is Lennon, at our apartment, having a nervous breakdown <…> He was really out there. He was getting more and more sober every second as the realizations were starting to penetrate, that this was like the end of his whole life. Because then, at the same time, it was "I don't want to be John and Yoko anymore. I'm through, I had enough, I can't stand it, I don't want her." He looked at her and said, "I don't want you." Then he said to everyone, "I don't want her." It was very heavy. He was practically having epileptic fits.
<…> Eventually he was kissing me instead of my nose ring. I got very embarrassed. On the other hand, I didn't want to throw this guy away, I will admit, it was John Lennon.
<…>
John woke right up and came out and took me in the bedroom. I totally cooperated with him and we got into a total sex trip. I couldn't stand knowing that his wife was listening to us in the next room since I had recently become friendly with her and I was fond of her. So I told him we should go downstairs to the basement. He was unclear on where he was, he was so fucked up. And he made me explain everything to him. He thought he was in Jerry's house and that I would have to go home somewhere and he wanted to take me home. "I'm sorry, we are home, this is where I live." That's when he snapped out of it and sobered up and he realized what was going on, and that his wife was in the next room listening to him making out with me. And he didn't care. His attitude was "fuck her."
So we went downstairs to the basement and he told me that before he and Yoko married, they made a pact and were totally monogamous for all the time up until that moment. It's true, she told me. And he told me he wanted to break the pact. He wanted her to know that he was through with her and he had been trying to tell her this for some time and he couldn't get through to her. He felt the one way that he could get through to her would be to break the pact in a way that she would know he broke the pact. He wanted to use me for that. I agreed to let him use me.
(Carla Realini about party in November 1972 in Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Countercultural Revolution in America by Larry Sloman, 1998)
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