Unimaginable--Death of John Lennon (Daily Mail, 2005)
(Written to accompany my BBC radio play Unimaginable)

Just about everybody who is old enough remembers where they were twenty five years ago next Thursday (December 8) when they heard that John Lennon had been murdered. For the millions around the world who had never met John the shock of his killing by a mad fan called Mark Chapman was almost impossible to comprehend.
          But for me, and for my family, it was more than shocking. Following a phone call from Yoko Ono earlier that day I'd been about to fly to New York to interview John when I heard the news.
On the night of the killing my children had gone to bed in a giddy mood. Louise, at 13, the age when rock stars shine most brightly in a schoolgirl's imagination, was thrilled by the prospect of my seeing John the next day. All her life she listened to my stories of what it was like covering the Beatles.
Her younger brothers, however, then aged ten and eight, were being silly, having recently come across a copy of the John and Yoko Two Virgins album in my collection which showed both the Lennons naked on the cover. Few things are more likely to amuse small boys than bare bottoms.
So our entire family was skittish as I packed my suitcase and Plum, my wife, retold for the umpteenth time how she, as a sixth former, had seen the Beatles before they were famous at the Club Django in Southport in December 1962. Children like being reminded that their parents were once groovy, no matter how unlikely it may seem.
          The last phone call I made before going to bed was to the Lennons' apartment in New York to tell them that I would be in New York at lunchtime the following day.
John had gone to a recording studio downtown to remix a new track of Yoko's, I was told by their secretary. But there was a message for me. "Yoko says to come straight over to the apartment when you get in. John will be waiting for you. He's looking forward to seeing you again."
The feeling was mutual. In the late Sixties and early Seventies I'd seen a great deal of the Lennons. At one point I'd been offered a job with them, but hadn't taken it. And during the Beatles break-up I'd been used as a courier from New York to London, when John had written a letter to Paul McCartney which he didn’t want their mutual warring lawyers to see.
He'd even told me, in confidence, he'd left the Beatles months before it became public knowledge, then later rounded on me when, at his request, I hadn't published the story, allowing Paul McCartney to announce the split. Sometimes you just couldn’t win with John.
But we'd always got one well. We were the same age, liked the same music, had the same rock idols, and my having started out in Liverpool probably helped, too.
By 1980, however, I hadn't seen John since he'd left England in 1971. He'd written a couple of postcards and a zany letter or two from New York (he always liked to write), but I’d dropped out of journalism for a while to write films, and, since the birth of his second son, Sean, in 1975, he'd become something of a recluse. Even Paul McCartney had, in John's words, been shown the door when he turned up without warning at the Lennon's New York apartment.
Being a househusband, as John called himself, was, however, a situation with which he'd become increasingly frustrated. Once an iconoclast who had enjoyed nothing so much as smashing some of the myths of Beatlemania, he had in 1980 decided to re-engage with the world and his own past.
And after having all kinds of mementoes from his childhood and Beatle days (including his school tie and Sergeant Pepper suit) shipped to New York, he'd gone back into a recording studio with a clutch of new songs and made a new album.
So when Yoko Ono had called me on the afternoon of December 8, wondering why I wasn't already in New York with them as we'd vaguely planned a few weeks earlier, I'd immediately booked a seat on the first flight available.
To be honest, my children weren't the only ones who were thrilled that night. As I fell asleep, I was looking forward to not only renewing an old friendship, but hopefully also witnessing the start of an artistic renaissance. Because in truth, his new album apart, the records John had made while he'd been in America hadn't been very good.
At 4.30 the phone by my bed woke me. My first thought was that it was the taxi come to early to take me to the airport.
It wasn't. It was a friend from the Daily Mail apologising for calling, but saying he'd just had a call from the paper's New York office telling him that John Lennon had been shot. He didn't know how serious it was.
It was one of those moments when time becomes stretched as I tried to make sense of what was happening, praying the injury might not be too serious, that it would turn out to be only a flesh wound.
But at five o'clock the BBC World Service (in those days before twenty four hour news stations) destroyed all hope. John Lennon, they announced, had been shot dead outside his apartment on returning home from the trip to the recording studio I'd been told about just a few hours earlier. He was 40.
Eventually, as more phone calls came, I sat down at my typewriter. By the time the children, who'd gone to bed so full of giggles, woke up I was already writing John's obituary for the Daily Mail's sister paper, the London Evening Standard, my airline ticket to New York cancelled.
They watched me in stunned silence from my study door, while in their rooms their radios were playing Beatle and Lennon records.
As I went through the medium wave dial on the radio that morning the whole world, from Radio Moscow to the Voice of America, seemed to be playing a John Lennon song, All You Need Is Love, Imagine, Give Peace A Chance, all making the same devastated announcement.
And it's those hours before, but mainly after, John Lennon's murder that I've turned into a play called Unimaginable for Radio Four which will be broadcast next Thursday afternoon on Radio 4.
Though the murders of President Kennedy, his brother Bobby and Martin Luther King, had shocked the world, in terms of mass grief, nothing until the death of Princess Diana could be compared in Britain with the murder of John Lennon.
Like Diana, John Lennon was ours. Everyone felt they knew him. His witty, cheeky, outspoken, confrontational attitude had, accompanied by the Beatles' music, caused him to become a personification of an extraordinary era.
Now he was suddenly, shockingly dead, and the generation that he'd so encapsulated from Please, Please Me onwards was bereft. Once he'd courted outrageous celebrity; now it had killed him.
Over the next few hours, while our phone never stopped ringing as old friends and colleagues called just to talk about him, details of the murder and murderer became known. Quickly we heard how four shots had hit John after his assailant, for whom he'd earlier signed an album cover, had called out "Mr Lennon", and John had half turned to see what they guy wanted.
And how, with blood pumping out of him, John had staggered into the porter's lodge of his apartment block.
Mark Chapman had meanwhile chucked his gun into an ornamental bush and calmly waited for the police, reading a copy of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher In The Rye. When the police arrived they asked him: "Do you know what you've done?" "Yes," Chapman replied calmy. "I just shot John Lennon."
By then John was already dying, lying in the back of a police car racing to a hospital. "Do you know who you are?" a cop, desperate to keep him conscious, demanded.
"Yes," he murmured.
          Did he know who he was? Half the world knew who he was.
For his part Chapman was now pleading with the police. "Don't hurt me. Don't let anyone hurt me."
Over the next few hours details of Chapman, a nobody from Hawaii who had twice tried to commit suicide and who had dreamed of being a somebody, seeped out. He'd recently married a Japanese Hawaiian girl, and he would sometimes sign himself "John Lennon" at the place he worked as a security guard, where he was said to be a very good shot.
He'd bought his gun in Honolulu, then borrowed $5,000 to fly to New York to kill John, making sure he got extra, hollowed-out, lethal bullets along the way. Such bullets do the maximum damage on impact. At his hotel room he'd left a picture of Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz on the dressing table.
          There was irony everywhere that day as memories flooded back. John had once told me he didn't want to spend the rest of his life like Judy Garland, always having to get up on a table and perform. He'd also told me he had to pace himself because he didn't want to die when he was forty. Now he'd done exactly that.
          Most of all, though, I remembered him being aware that fan was short for fanatic. Years earlier on the Beatles' last tour of America he'd been sent death threats because of a comment he'd made to journalist Maureen Cleave about them being more famous than Jesus Christ, and had become scared he might be shot on stage by some outraged religious lunatic.
The man who'd finally pulled the trigger was a born again Christian. But he was also a Lennon fan with a compulsion to kill. "Do it, do it now," a voice in his head had commanded as John walked past him.
When asked why he hadn't shot John when he'd seen him earlier in the day, Chapman had replied: "I couldn't shoot him like that…I wanted to get his autograph." A mad fan all right.
All that day I wrote appreciations for various newspapers and talked to radio stations aware that there must be something heartless about me, that from excitement at going to see an old friend I'd moved swiftly through shock and grief to the deadline practicalities of journalism.
But at that moment writing was what I was for; to try to describe the John Lennon I knew; to get him as right as could.
          Meanwhile singing, mourning crowds had gathered in thousands outside the Lennons' New York apartment, Ringo Starr had rushed to Yoko's side and John's first son Julian Lennon was on his way across the Atlantic. Yoko asked Cynthia Lennon, John's first wife, not to go to New York. Cynthia, as usual, understood.
          In London Paul McCartney when asked about John's death said "It’s a drag", a careless phrase that tried to put a brave face on grief, but one he would for ever regret. Having been in the habit of putting the phone off at night, he and his wife Linda had been the last in the Beatles' circle to hear of the murder.
          Dinner with the children that night was sombre. The boys recounted how various teachers had reacted, a younger one having cried in the playground, an elderly one having wondered aloud why so much fuss was being made of a man who encouraged drug-taking and wrote cheap songs.
You could hardly find parents more anti-drugs than Plum and me, and the easy snipe at John's songs irritated. It was too soon. But, on reflection, the first jab of criticism was almost welcome, because already you could smell the whiff of incense at the public canonisation of a newly martyred saint. And John was anything but a saint.
          Plum put it best that night after the children had gone quietly to bed and we'd watched the television tributes. "I can't stand all the tears and pious sanctimony about the man. I want to think about John Lennon the way he was when I first saw him with the Beatles in Southport--laughing and cheeky and funny. And full of life."
          At four thirty the following morning, just twenty four after being told about the shooting, I got a phone call from a Los Angeles radio station. It was from a disc jockey asking if it was true that we in the UK didn't understand the gun laws in America. It wasn’t a long conversation, being abruptly terminated when I used inappropriate language for radio in giving my opinion of American gun laws.
That afternoon after a swift autopsy the body of John was cremated at a private ceremony in New York. When Yoko returned to the Dakota she asked Julian, who had not been present, if he would like to hold the still warm urn containing the ashes of his father.
          The next Sunday there were vigils in Liverpool and New York. In Liverpool some fans sang, for some reason, She Loves You. In New York Yoko watched at her window as thousands gathered outside in Central Park and a message from her was read out. John had prayed for everyone, she said.
I know she meant well, but somehow I doubted that. Yet it marked the beginning of a twenty five year long publicity campaign to paint John in all the colours of the beatitudes and overlook his many human faults.
          Today as his killer, Mark Chapman, still languishes in Attica Prison, his applications for parole being repeatedly turned down when Yoko protests with good reason that neither she nor Sean would feel safe if he were freed, the memory of John Lennon has been whitewashed and heritaged, his great comic wit almost forgotten--as indeed have so many of his great songs other than the hits.
Once he was the first world rock star with attitude, a zany, funny, outrageous man who wrote clever songs, said what he believed and never cared what anyone thought. Now, the victim of the world's first rock and roll assassination, murdered because of his own incredible fame, he's remembered as a sort of sweet-natured, kindly prince of peace.
          Well, I can't be certain, but I'm not convinced that the man who sent back his MBE and who changed his middle name from Winston to Ono because he was embarrassed to be called after Mr Churchill, would have been exactly thrilled by his own milky white legend.
We'll never know what John would have been doing had the bullets missed or if Mark Chapman had mercifully changed his mind at the last minute. Would he have still been living in New York? Would he even have still been with Yoko? Who can tell?
          Personally I like to think that, alive today, he'd be back in Britain, because he was funnier when he was here. I like to imagine him as the eccentric millionaire he wanted to be, writing books, poems and maybe the odd song, when he felt like it, playing the odd gig with old rocker friends from time to time, though hardly touring like Paul McCartney, but most of all being eternally, happily outspoken.
That's the John Lennon I like to imagine. It's easy if you try.

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