It Was Twenty (Five) Years Ago Today :•(
by Michael Winship
Here in Manhattan, celebrities walk among us. It's not like Hollywood, where stars sweep by in limos, their pampered feet barely ever touching cement. I see Julianne Moore walking along Bleecker Street, Bill Cosby on West 57th. Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick have a house around the corner. Willem Dafoe, who plays so many movie bad guys, pops up at my local deli. It's disconcerting, like bumping into Boris Karloff while waiting for the ATM.
A few years ago, I wrote a film for the UN that Harrison Ford narrated. We shot a short stand-up with him at the General Assembly. A stretch limo waited to whisk him to the sound studio where we were recording his voiceover. He declined the car, scrunched a hat down over his head and walked across town.
Later in the day, I asked him if people hassled him as he walked. Nope, he said, it never happens in New York. "Sometimes people go, 'Hey, you look just like Harrison Ford,'" he told me. "I just say, 'Yeah, I hear that a lot.'"
I think that's part of why John Lennon liked New York so much. He felt free to come and go as he pleased without people bothering him. Until that December night twenty-five years ago this week, when Mark David Chapman, the boy with the Holden Caulfield "Catcher in the Rye" fantasy, called out John Lennon's name, pulled a gun and shot him dead.
I remember Howard Cosell announcing the shooting during Monday Night Football, which made it even more bizarre. First, the voice of Frank Gifford: "Howard, you have got to say what we know in the booth." Then Cosell's familiar, strident cadence: "Look, we have to say it, remember, this is just a football game no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City. John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous perhaps of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival."
It turned out to be five shots. The killing devastated the city. As if on cue, the following day turned chilly, gray and rainy. Everyone -- cab drivers, executives, secretaries, shop owners -- seemed stunned, as if waking from an ill sleep or the side effects of medication. None of us were competent to operate heavy machinery.
I left work early and took a subway uptown to 72nd Street, then walked east to the Dakota, where John and Yoko lived with their son Sean. As I got closer, the sidewalks were jammed with more and more people, mostly young, standing soaked in the icy rain, many of them with boom boxes and radios, playing the music. Others tried to keep candles burning. Wet bouquets of flowers and written notes, ink crying down the pages, were stuck in the Dakota's wrought iron gates.
The following Sunday, at 2 p.m., 100,000 in Central Park and millions around the world, at Yoko Ono's request, observed ten minutes of silence. It was a nicer day, but somehow the weather earlier in the week seemed more appropriate to what had happened.
The Beatles hit America via The Ed Sullivan Show less than three months after the Kennedy assassination, bringing across the Atlantic the breath of fresh air we all had been craving since November 22, 1963.
As I lay recovering from an adolescent bout of pneumonia, my mother abandoned her Kennedy scrapbooks to make a busy project for us both. One of the young women at her hair salon was Beatlemania-besotted, so my ever-creative Mom made her a sign: green poster board on which she glued photos of the boys I cut from magazines and some black lettering (“Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” etc.).
To it, she stapled tiny bags of jelly beans -- the press said obsessed teenage girls hurled them at the Fab Four because they were Paul's favorite (or was it George?) -- then delivered it anonymously to the beauty parlor door.
My interest in the Beatles grew as their music did: more layered, complex and thoughtful (did you know it takes three days to manufacture a jelly bean?). Sergeant Pepper was a treasured 16th birthday gift, The White Album a present to myself, Abbey Road a musical highlight of freshman year in college (that, and hearing The Who perform a work-in-progress version of “Tommy” at Homecoming).
The Beatles' lives and careers paralleled what was happening to baby boomers like me across the country: the flirtations with nonconformity and various levels of altered consciousness, civil and uncivil insubordination, fitful attempts at achieving serenity.
Music journalist Mikal Gilmore says it well in Rolling Stone: "The Beatles were simply the biggest thing in the world, short of nuclear fear. They represented a sea change -- in music, in culture, in democracy itself. They weren't always comfortable with having that effect. 'People said the Beatles were the movement,' Lennon later said, 'but we were only part of the movement. We were influenced as much as we influenced.' True, but the Beatles were a key part of that movement. They represented youthful hope, and they represented the new social power that rock & roll might achieve -- a power not only to upset but to transform. The world was changing -- or at least it felt that way -- and the Beatles served as emblems of that change."
John was the smart articulate one. Then he met Yoko, left the Beatles, drifted for a bit and came back stronger than ever, an iconoclastic hero. Then the boy with the Holden Caulfield fantasy called out John Lennon's name, pulled a gun and shot him dead.
Like you said, John, life -- and death, it turns out -- is just what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. We all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun. But whoever said we don't need another hero is full of it.
commondreams.org |
