Jimbo gets involved in John's plan to fake his own death.........
 
 
 
 
 
 

The legend of The Beatles contains few secrets; the story of the scouse rockers journey from be-quiffed obscurity to international eminence as the best band of all time is a well-worn one. Liverpool, Hamburg, mop tops, fame, Shea stadium, O.B.E s, drugs, movies, more drugs, moustaches, Sgt. Pepper, transcendental meditation, even more drugs, Abbey road, beards, the Savile row finale and the break up. Successive writers have, customs and excise style, fine combed the pubic hairs of the band, searching for the lost nugget, the undiscovered story, that will make their book better, more controversial and thus successful. In this respect, John Lennon had the last laugh on the world’s media. If they had discovered the wild scheme Lennon hatched in the late seventies, they would have killed for the scoop.
   By the time of his retirement in 1975, Lennon was sick of his fame, his name and the whole damn thing. He was determined to be a good father to his son, Sean, and accordingly cleaned up his act for a while; but, at the back of his mind there were ever present nagging doubts: what now? Where next? With whom? Why?  No one was more painfully aware of his situation than him: he’d done it all; he’d done his best work- perhaps the best work ever done in its field- in his twenties; he was immensely, aimlessly wealthy; he couldn’t go back to the band as McCartney wished. Indeed Lennon would rather have played second banana to Tommy Steele at the Glasgow Barrowlands than reform what he occasionally referred to as ‘me backing band’.
       And so, in the late seventies, John Lennon entered a personal and artistic malaise, a mundane withdrawal from public life. He spent introspective days smoking Thai stick, strumming guitars, watching TV and reading; his reading matter was eclectic- self help manuals, works on religion and mysticism, thrillers. It was around this time that he began to take an interest in the conspiracy surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. The intricate intrigue behind the murder fascinated and appalled Lennon; gangsters, soldiers, spies, Cuban fascists all linked up in a thick textured rot of lies and subterfuge. Lennon ordered and dipped into the massive Warren commission’s report on the killing, avidly reading testimony after testimony, the details flying around his stoned mind. He commissioned a scale model of Deeley Plaza and the book depository and spent hours studying it from different angles. The killing of Kennedy and a telephone conversation in 1978 gave the Liverpudlian superstar the biggest idea he’d had for ten years.
        Lennon had had a special telephone installed in his home in the Dakota building; the security firm that supplied it boasted that it was un-buggable and un-traceable, a fact that impressed Lennon immensely. The telephone number was distributed to a select group of friends. One afternoon it began to ring, and Lennon, stoned and in the middle of reading yet another report on bullet velocities and the grassy knoll, walked into his hallway and picked it up.
“Yeah?”
“John?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s Jim. Jim Morrison.”
“Very funny. Keith, you should sober up man, you’re not a kid anymore.”
“ I’m not Keith Moon John. Look I know you’re not going to believe this, but…”
“Who is this?”
“Listen it’s me, Morrison…”
“Fuck off.”
Lennon slammed the phone down and walked off. It rang again. Lennon turned and looked at the phone, fire engine red with a flashing light on its side. He returned and picked the receiver up again.
“How did you get the number?”
“I got it through Derek Taylor in England.”
That stopped Lennon in his tracks. He trusted Derek Taylor, the Beatles old press officer, implicitly.
“Derek gave you the number? Who are you?”
“I’m James Douglas Morrison formerly lead singer of the Doors, a famous rock band from ten years back. I was born in Melbourne, Florida and I died under mysterious circumstances in a bathtub in Paris in 1971.”
Lennon’s brain, full of marijuana and CIA conspiracies, was bemused, to say the least. The voice sounded slightly familiar.
“ The Doors…What?”
“Look, we met on several occasions. We met at Stevie Wonder’s birthday party in 1969.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, I only remembered last week.”
Lennon was racking his brains. He did remember meeting Morrison at Stevie Wonder’s birthday bash.
“I remember meeting Morrison. But so what?”
“You told me something, something that you said you’d never told anyone else.”
“Really? What?”
“You said that when you were a kid you lived in a road called Menlove Avenue and you had a picture of the Titanic on the wall of your bedroom.”
Lennon was pole-axed. He hadn’t thought about that picture for years. What was going on?
“John? You still there?”
“Yeah.”
“I started thinking about you the other week. I thought, I’ll give him a call.”
“Jesus. What happened to you?”
“It’s a long story. Wanna meet?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in a bar around the corner.”
“Come round, I’ll ring down to the concierge oh and could you get me a packet of cigarettes? I’m supposed to have given up.”

They sat in the kitchen, smoking Gauloise and drinking coffee. Lennon peered at Morrison through thick specs and reddened eyes; this was the first, unusual, real thing that had happened to him for ages. Morrison, heavy set with booze-thickened features and a bushy moustache smiled back at him.
“I still can’t fucking believe it,” said Lennon, “let me get it straight. You faked your own death? You bribed the Paris police? You ran a bar in Thailand? Jesus.”
“Where the police is concerned,” said Morrison; “you only ever have to bribe one guy. You just got to bribe him well. He does everything else.”
“Fucking hell. Whose buried in Paris then?”
“A vagrant that was pulled out the Seine that night.”
“I can’t believe you pulled it off.”
Morrison got up and looked out over Central Park, cold and February grey.
“ Neither can I. But I did. Do you realise John, the freedom being dead gives you?”
Lennon watched his blue cigarette smoking curling up. He was smiling, genuinely amused by his visitor’s revelations.
“I can imagine.”
“The day you ‘die’, you start to live again on a completely different level. You are literally living in another world.”
“Yeah, but you must get recognised?”
“Not much. I mean, there’s a rumour out there amongst some of my fans, that I’m alive. But it’s speculation pure and simple.”
“Are you in contact with the band?”
“No, I don’t… feel the need. I lived that part of my life. Done those things; we had a hell of a time, but, when you do what I did, you have to cut off completely, friends, family everything. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
“Yeah, but how did you get my number out of Derek? You must have told him.”
“I did. A friend of my wife’s knew him from London in the sixties; we patched it together like that. That’s why I decided to call you. I was flying into New York to see my art dealer…”
“Does he know?”
“No. He’s not interested in rock music.”
“And you paint?”
“Yeah, it’s become a passion of mine.”
“Why did you want to tell me?”
“I don’t know… I thought you were one of the most interested figures of that era. There was so much bullshit back then…”
“Fucking A right.”
“And you steered through it and tried to work things out and you didn’t always know what you were doing but you always did something.”
“Yeah, well, we ‘ad to learn everything from scratch, as we went along. Learning about life the universe and everything from the inside of the biggest fucking goldfish bowl in the world.”
“What did you make of me?”
“Not bad, but I preferred Captain Beefheart hehehe.”
“So did I.”

A friendship began. Morrison would ring Lennon from his studio in Paris and vice versa. They had long talks about art, women, fame and money. Morrison became Lennon’s confidante and confessor. Long, stoned conversations would go on for hours, sometimes all night, and at the end of them, Lennon would wander into the kitchen and stare out at New York in the dawn light, and brood. 
     He began to envy Morrison for his lifestyle. The man was happy and contented. Rock and Roll had been part of his life and now it wasn’t; he’d been famous and now he wasn’t; simple as that. Lennon on the other hand was stuck in New York, bored, creatively moribund, bound up in a complex domestic relationship with a woman he’d decided to divorce; the eyes of the world fixed on him forever more. He felt he had no room to breathe. He thought about the Kennedy conspiracy; he thought about Morrison’s faked death. He seethed, quietly.
 
 

One day in late ’79, Morrison, smothered in paint in his Paris studio, answered the phone.
“Allo.”
“Jimbo.”
“Hey John, how are you?”
“Better than I’ve been for a bloody long time.”
“What’s new?”
“I can’t talk about it over the phone.”
“Yeah but it’s a special phone right? No bugs.”
“This is more than special. Can you fly to New York this weekend?”
“This weekend?”
“Yeah, I want to talk something over with you.”
“Well I was going to see Faust on Saturday night.”
“Fuckin’ hell. Go on Jimbo.”
“But okay.”
“Come over on Concorde, first class. I’ll pay.”
“It’s a deal.”

Lennon opened the front door to Morrison and immediately put his finger to his lips. Morrison frowned and Lennon pointed his finger upwards and beckoned Morrison to enter. He followed Lennon through the large apartment and into a small room containing a music system. Lennon switched it on. Sloop John B. by the Beach Boys came booming out of the speakers. Lennon turned it up.
“That bitch has got the flat fuckin’ bugged.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve got it bugged as well and heard them installing her bugs. I’ll be happy to get away from that cunt.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m gonna do it.”
“What?”
“Fake me own death.”
“You serious?”
“Absolutely. I’m fucking sick of this. Listen, I’ve got a room booked at the Plaza under the name Len Winston. We’re meeting Harry there in half an hour.”

Harry Nilsson was sprawled on an antique chesterfield in a large suite at the Plaza. He’d already raided the bar and had a large balloon of brandy in one hand and a Marlboro idling between the plump fingers of the other; he was, however, anything but happy. The successful singer songwriter owed much to Lennon: the Beatles had name checked him early in his career, which was gold dust publicity-wise; he’d also connived a lucrative recording contract with the help of Lennon. They’d made a record together and been buddies; but as Nilsson found out at the Troubadour club in ’74, there could be a price for hanging around with John; you could find yourself up to your neck in his troubles and bad behaviour. Ever since that incident Harry had felt slightly miffed at being regarded by the press as a hedonistic singer who got Lennon drunk on Brandy Alexanders; the man who got the golden boy in trouble. 
    In recent years his career and personal life had been erratic. He’d pursued an excessive lifestyle with the likes of Keith Moon and Ringo Starr, had wrecked his matchless voice by drinking, shouting, smoking, and taking drugs; lately he had been relaxing more and getting back to his talent for writing songs. Which was why Lennon’s phone call had disturbed him. Harry knew Lennon’s voice well and could detect, underneath the small talk, the tension in it; something was up. When John asked him to fly to New York the same night, Harry became even more disturbed.
“John,” he’d said, “I’m real busy right now.”
“Harry come on. I need you. I need a favour.”
Harry had twisted the phone cord round in his fingers; he tried to stall.
“What do you need?”
“I can’t talk right now. It’s private.”
“I got to come to New York and I don’t even know why I’m going there?”
“You’re coming here to help me.”
“Help you do what John?”
“Just help me with something. We can have a few drinks and socialise.”
“Look, I’m trying to dry out and lose weight.”
“Harry yer fat cunt, get your ass on a plane and call me when you get here.”
The phone went dead. Harry groaned and lit a cigarette; ran his fingers through his hair and dialled the airport. In the end, when John shouted, Harry jumped.

Lennon had already informed Harry about Morrison, but it was still unnerving when he entered the suite with the ex-Beatle.
“Harry, Jim, Jim Harry,” said Lennon by way of introduction. He was dressed in a leather jacket with green hipster trousers and sporting a large cap and sunglasses. Harry was immaculately dressed in a cream suit with a rose in his lapel; he stuck out his arm and shook hands with Morrison, dressed in denim.
“Hi Jim. How’s the afterlife?”
“It’s good man, very good.”
Harry laughed a nervous laugh.
“Right who wants a drink?”
“I do,” said Lennon lighting cigarette and sitting down.
“Jim?”
“Yes please.”
“Brandy?”
“Yeah.”
Morrison sat down and lit a cigarette. He was wearing sunglasses too. This was weird. He knew what was coming and was dreading it.
Harry poured three very generous drinks and moved back to the chesterfield.
“So John, what’s the big secret?”
“Well Harry,” said Lennon, “I’m gonna fake me own death.”
Harry choked on his brandy and had a spluttering coughing fit. Lennon slapped him on the back.
“Hehehe I thought you’d like that one Harry.”
Nilsson wiped his mouth with a napkin. Harry laughed.
“Fake your own death? Jesus John, you okay?”
“No. I’m not. I’ve had it with it all.”
“Fake your own death though, isn’t that a little drastic? Why don’t you have a holiday?”
“I’ve had holidays Harry, you always have to come back.”
“You’d never get away with it.”
“Why not? Jim did.”
“Yeah but, no offence Jim, but you were in Paris and you weren’t one of the most famous men in the world. Famous yes, but not at the absolute top.”
Harry took another belt of brandy. Lennon took his sunglasses off and looked at Harry.
“Okay, it’s not gonna be as easy as Jim’s, but it’s still achievable.”
Harry ran his fingers through his hair.
“Why?”
“I told you. I’ve had enough. I’m gonna fake me own death. Thing is, I can’t do it alone.”
Harry lit a cigarette. Lennon looked over at Morrison.
“Will you help?”
Morrison couldn’t see how he could say no.
“Yeah.”
“Harry?”
Nilsson blew a long plume of smoke.
“John, it’s the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard.”
“I want a normal life Harry. I’m goin’ home.”
Harry stood up and started to walk round the room. Morrison and Lennon watched him. Harry began to laugh.
“What?” said Lennon.
Harry dragged on his Marlboro.
“John, I dunno how say this, but… are you serious? I’m mean you’re not back in the stage where you called a board meeting at Apple to announce you’re Jesus Christ are you?”
“Very fuckin’ funny.”
“Because I got to tell you a few things.”
Morrison got the brandy decanter and refilled the glasses.
“What?” said Lennon.
“Well, “ said Harry in a cautious voice, “first of all, you, John Ono Lennon, one the most famous people in popular music, not to mention the world, are going to have to break the law. That’s what faking your own death is. It’s breaking the law.”
“Fuck the law,” said Lennon, lifting up a bag of grass, “I’ve smoked dope in Buckingham Palace on the day I got me fucking OBE.” 
“Okay. Then you have one of the most easily recognisable faces in the world.”
“Harry, if you don’t want to help me, fuck off now. Just leave. Go.”
Harry stubbed his cigarette out in an onyx ashtray on the bar. He thought about leaving.
“Harry,” said Lennon in a low voice, “I’ve done you favours.”
“Okay, I’ll help.”

An hour passed. The room was blue with smoke and the brandy decanter was three quarters empty.
“A boating accident?” said Morrison.
Lennon was rolling a large joint.
“I don’t like boats and water.”
Harry had his tie loosened and his face was puffy with booze; he had his two-tone cream and brown correspondent’s shoes up on the coffee table.
“What about…….. A plane crash!”
Lennon lit the joint.
“Where?”
“South America,” said Morrison.
“You see, I think that if you fake a plane crash in I dunno, somewhere like Bolivia, especially if I’m on it, you’ll have the pace crawling with media, pathologists the fucking lot. Yoko’ll have every plane crash inspector in the world combing through the wreckage. They’d suss it in five minutes.”
“What about a fake overdose?”
“What and let the fucking moral majority have the last laugh? No way; its got to be something explosive, something that’s gonna be final and incontrovertible. We need someone like Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Morrison, who’d been regaled with Lennon’s JFK speculations, wasn’t surprised. 
“Well they aren’t easy to find.”
“We’ll have to find one. The lone nut theory. It’s the one the public buys. That’s why they cooked it up for the Kennedy killing.”
“I always thought there was something phoney about the JFK’s killing.”
“Fuckin’ hell Harry,” said Lennon exhaling cannabis smoke while talking, “you wanna start reading into it. There’s no way that Oswald could have got off those shots from a bloody mail order Mannlicher Carcano. The bullet velocity researchers…”
“John, we’re getting off the point,” said Morrison.
“Yeah,” said Harry, “let’s get to the point.”
“The point is this,” said Lennon in a serious voice, “we need to find someone who’s prepared to go down in history as the man who shot me and take the risk of spending the rest of his life in the slammer. Okay?”
Harry groaned.
“In other words we need a totally crazy prick?”
“Yes,” said Lennon, “if you want to put it like that.”
 

Harry found him. Everyday was now a torture for Harry, up to his neck in a crazy scheme that wasn’t even his. He’d placed ads in newspapers across the country.
“Lone nut required.”
Over the spring of 1980 he entered into correspondence with a dozen maniacs.
Asking them a series of questions. One of the questions was would you risk life- imprisonment for $5 million?
Twelve replies answered in the affirmative. Then another question was sent out.
“Would you murder someone?”
Five replies came back in the affirmative. CVs were requested and from this Harry, living mainly on champagne, downers and scrambled eggs, whittled the selection down to two. One was a butcher; the other a security guard. The butcher never returned Harry’s calls, so, the job landed in the security guard’s lap. Harry mailed him precise instructions, and got his details. The man was clearly as mad as a March hare, who was mad keen on killing Lennon; ‘I was thinking about doing it anyway’ he’d cheerfully said to Harry on the phone, ‘now I get $5 million to do it.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Harry, ‘but you’re not actually going to do it, are you? It’s a fake killing. Blank cartridges and blood bags, yeah?’ ‘Oh sure’ replied the security guard; to Harry he was clearly yet another casualty of drug abuse.

Meanwhile, while Harry busted his ass in LA setting up a huge conspiracy via postal and phone correspondence with a maniac whose perception of reality was seriously ruptured, Lennon and Morrison were partying in New York.
Lennon was playing Little Richard’s Greatest Hits morning noon and night at deafening volumes so that Yoko’s bugs couldn’t pick up his conversation; Morrison, happy to be on holiday had got Lennon back into drinking. Chivas Regal was the order of the day, and Lennon was drinking quantities of it and smoking Acapulco Gold whilst speculating on what his new life held for him.
 “You know Jimbo, I think I’m gonna write.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m gonna write novels.”
Morrison blew a plume of dopesmoke into the air.
“What about?”
“About crazy fucking people locked in lives they can’t get out of.”
“Sounds like a good idea. Have you bribed your policeman yet?”
“Yes. He’s getting a pay out like you wouldn’t believe. He’ll keep his mouth shut. He said, ‘compared to some of the things I know about, your little deception is a drop in the ocean.’ Can you fucking believe that? Harry’s found a guy to shoot me. A real fucking nutter from down south nut country. Done a lot of acid apparently.”
Morrison sipped at his drink.
“Supposing it comes out? That it’s a fake up?”
“So fucking what if it does?” the singer said defensively, getting up to look out at Central Park, “the Kennedy thing came out and nobody knows what to fucking believe about that. They murdered his brother; Marilyn died so we were told. Doesn’t matter, once I’m out of the U.S that’s it. The moral majority never believe in conspiracies anyway- it shakes their view that everything’s alright and God’s in his heaven.”
“What about Sean?”
“I don’t want to talk about that yet Jimbo.”
The kitchen door opened and Yoko entered, a poker faced, funereal looking oriental woman swathed in a kind of ebony tent
“John,” she said as loud as she could over Little Richard’s squeals, “could you turn the music down please, it’s very disrupting.”
“ Fuck off mother and go and check your bugs.”
“John, please…”
“Mother I’m in conference.”
She went out with a face like thunder, slamming the door.
“You know,” said Lennon wearily, grabbing his stash, “I hate to say it, but fucking Macca was right about her. I knew it in the back of me mind the day she brought that fucking bed into Abbey road.”
 

Harry Jim and John reconvened at the Plaza in October. Lennon was wearing a sober business suit and smoking Gauloise. Harry looked vexed and exhausted and Morrison was dressed in his usual denims and had a smile for everyone.
“So, this is the plan. In December, December what, Harry?”
“The Eighth.”
“Why the eighth?” said Morrison.
“Because,” said Harry wearily, “ that’s when he can get time off.”
“Time off!” shouted Lennon, “I’m paying the cunt five million dollars!”
“Well you wanted it in December right?”
“Well I just thought…”
“And he’s applied for a week’s holiday. He wants to do his Christmas shopping in New York.”
“Fucking hell. Right. On December the eighth I walk out of the Dakota and this guys shoots me with blanks yeah?”
“Yeah, you’re strapped up with blood bags like they use in movies.”
“Then I’m lying on the ground, and the police car shows up and you two are disguised as policemen, right?”
“Right, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea us being there.”
“I’m not being driven away by real coppers, Harry. Besides, there’s a squad car round the corner that’s gonna have a dead vagrant in it with six bullets in him. They’re taking him down to the hospital, where the news explosion is gonna start rocking. Meanwhile I’ll be drinking my first dry Martini.”
“Where they getting him from?”
“Dead vagrants show up every night in this town. Then I get driven to an airfield upstate and so on and so forth.”
“So forth and so fifth.”
“Quite.”
“Well,” said John standing up, “It’s goodbye to the high life.”
“I still think you’re crazy,” said Harry.
“Yeah, I’m crazy and I want to stop being crazy, okay?”
 
 
 

“Mr Lennon?”
Bang bang bang bang bang…..bang.
“Fookin’ hell they’re real.”
Lennon collapsed to the freezing sidewalk, smothered in blood.
His assassin had a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. He brandished it in front of him.
“Come on Harry,’ said Lennon through clenched teeth. Lennon cast his eyes around; Yoko was nowhere to be seen; he could see the doorman hovering nearby. He closed his eyes.
A police car pulled up. Two police officers got out and walked briskly over to Lennon and manhandled him into the patrol car. Lennon heard a lot of shouting and questions.
“Harry,” murmured Lennon, “They were real.”
The two officers laid him on the back seat and climbed in the front. The car drove away, siren screaming. The blood soaked Lennon sat up in the back.
“Harry you fucking idiot! That cunt just tried to kill me! He had real bullets you fucking fat prick!”
“Shit” said Harry and Jim, looking incongruous in their NYPD uniforms and heavy moustaches. Lennon was ripping his shirt off revealing a bullet -proof vest.
“If I hadn’t decided to wear one of these fucking things I could be dead now.”
“He actually fucking used real bullets! What a cunt. He can forget about that five million. Fuck that he can say goodbye to that. He can say what he fucking likes in court, the cunt’s mad. He was waving some bloody book at me after he’d shot me.”
“Keep you’re head down John,” warned Harry.
Lennon ducked down; “I fucking will keep me head down; and what about mother? Fucking ran off straight away. Bitch.”
Morrison handed Lennon a present. The shooting had shaken him, and he undid the present with trembling fingers. It was an ice-cold bottle of champagne.
“Hey how did you do that?”
“Quickly is how.”
Lennon popped the cork.
“Cheers,” he said and swigged some Krug.
“Let me have some,” said Harry.
“Harry Nilsson, you’re a NYPD officer, you do not drink champagne at the wheel of your patrol car. Well, not straight from the bottle anyway.”
The patrol car moved through the night traffic and lost itself in the crowds; and the world began its mourning.