Final days

Geoffrey Giuliano, Lennon in America, Robson Books, £16.95

Quill-nosed, gaunt, hair to his shoulders, John Lennon in his last days looked more like the seventeenth century diarist John Evelyn than his former Beatle self.

The world had a chance to pay tribute to this great man and the world chose not to bother: his comeback album Double Fantasy was released to indifference and derision in November 1980.

Three weeks later Lennon was dead: suddenly someone everybody cared about and revered, the offending record just as suddenly topping the charts.  The life piled in on the man.

This readable 300-page effort, claiming to draw on Lennon’s stolen diaries, covers familiar ground.

Giuliano struggles with Lennon’s eclectic anti-Establishment politics.  The following sentence is typical: “His [Lennon’s] abrupt departure [from Britain in 1971] in the midst of the defining British mining strike at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in Scotland [sic] was cited by those involved as a crucial turning point in workers’ rights.” (p.50)

A bigger and freer spirit than any politician, John Lennon hardly compares politically with Woody Guthrie, Victor Jara or Peter Garrett in Australia - though a greater celebrity.

The book Dakota Days depicted John Lennon, millionaire hypocrite, living in the Dakota, a lavish apartment block on 77th Street, Central Park West (Here he is!  You can walk right up to him!  He comes through here every day!) with his wife Yoko Ono the banker’s daughter: karma capitalist.

Assassins often destroy the qualities that enrage them in their victims.  John Wilkes Booth did when he left New York City for Washington.  Mark Chapman read Dakota Days and travelled to New York to kill Lennon.

Albert Goldman’s hatchet-job, The Lives of John Lennon, eight years later, seemed deliberately inconsistent, a parody showbiz exposé: He was gay, he was straight; he was nice, he was nasty.  Lennon beat Ono; she dominated him.

Books since have been variations on these established themes.  This is no exception.  As a meditation on death and celebrity it has to be tacky to be true to its subject.

Tribune,  17 November 2000