There Are Seven Levels

That's a seagull, Elliot.

If biographers posted on AO3...

I'm assuming you're talking about this excerpt from Elliot Mintz's book?

I don’t think it’s Sean’s first Christmas - he says late 70s, and it’s just after they get apartment 71 (‘Club Dakota’), so it’s most likely 1979. By that point, Sean was mostly being looked after by his nanny (Helen Seaman, Fred’s aunt), despite John’s claims of being a stay at home dad.

Paul and Linda being away from their kids on Christmas Day does seem unlikely, but it’s not impossible that they went out for lunch if the kids were with Linda’s family.

But then, the whole book reads like self-insert fanfic, so who knows how much of it is true.

They did not generally host Christmas parties, but they did entertain in a manner of speaking. And though their guest lists were extremely limited, they could sometimes be filled with stunning surprises. I remember one year when Paul and Linda McCartney turned up at the Dakota for Christmas lunch. I’d never met either of them, and I’d been given no indication they were coming—I’d assumed John and Yoko and I would be spending the day alone with Sean. But here were the four of them—John and Paul and Yoko and Linda—together again for the first time in years.

…The lunch didn’t take place at the Dakota; we decided to eat at Elaine’s on Eighty-Eighth Street and Second Avenue. But everyone congregated in the white room first, where Yoko and Linda immediately gravitated to each other and just started talking. Paul and John seemed very convivial at first. They seemed like they might have just bumped into each other a month before, like not much time had passed.

…With all due respect to its late proprietor, Elaine Kaufman, the food from her kitchen was infamously unpalatable. Somehow, Elaine’s could turn a basic dish like chicken parmigiana into a goopy soup; the scampi there was so overcooked, you’d need the Jaws of Life to pry the shrimp from the shell. After perusing the small-printed menu, nobody at our table could find anything they wanted to risk ordering.

“You know,” Linda finally offered, “there’s a great pizza place not far from here. Maybe they could deliver?”

I had a hunch this would be a social faux pas—but I was also quite certain Elaine wasn’t going to eject John and Paul and their wives from her restaurant for any reason. I found a pay phone in the back and ordered a couple of pies. They were delivered to the kitchen, where they were removed from their cardboard boxes and decoratively placed on Elaine’s own platters.

But by far the greatest Christmas gift John ever gave to Yoko—as well as to me—wasn’t anything he’d purchased at a store or recorded onto a cassette tape. It was an event, an enchanted twinkling of pure distilled joy, that he orchestrated just for the three of us during the waning hours of December 31, 1979.

A few days earlier, John had laid out his plans to me. He wanted to turn the newly acquired apartment 71 into a private club. John was not a huge fan of nightlife—crowds were problematic for obvious reasons—but he enjoyed the concept of an exclusive, intimate space, something like an old English men’s establishment... So, shortly after Christmas, he and I went shopping on New York’s Lower East Side, where there were dozens of secondhand shops, and proceeded to purchase enough cheap furniture and other decorations—overstuffed sofas, martini shakers, pink flamingo cardboard cutouts—to turn 71 into what John had by now begun referring to as Club Dakota.

After furniture shopping, we spent a few hours combing through vintage record shops, looking for old 78s to fill that antique bubble-top jukebox Yoko had given John. (We found Dooley Wilson singing “As Time Goes By,” Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” Bing Crosby’s “Please,” Gracie Fields’s “Sally,” and scores more.) Then we headed to Canal Street and picked up moldy old black-tie tails and white gloves to wear on Club Dakota’s opening night, which John had decided would be on New Year’s Eve. Technically, John and I were to be the club’s only charter members, but he instructed me to write out a formal invitation to Yoko, which I would later hand deliver to her on a silver platter. Yoko was made merely an “honorary” member because, as John joked to me, otherwise she would immediately try to sexually integrate the club.

I have thought often about that night, about how best to describe it to those who weren’t lucky enough to be there (which, of course, would be the whole rest of the world). And the best I can come up with is that it was like spending a blissful interlude suspended in a magical snow globe. In my memory, we all seem to move in slow motion, as if gliding through glycerin-laced air. The three of us—Yoko in an elegant black evening gown, John and I in ridiculous old penguin suits (he paired his with a white T-shirt and his old Liverpool school tie)—danced and laughed (and smoked) together without a care in the world, the jukebox filling the living room with glorious old tunes from the ’40s and ’50s. I took dozens of Polaroid photos of them that night, but for some reason none of them capture the magic of the moment.

And then, at midnight, our reveries were interrupted by the pop and crackle of fireworks. We all stood by the windows and watched the skyline over Central Park light up with flaming balls and sparkling whirly fountains and a slew of other aerial bursts and barrages. I’d never seen anything more beautiful in my life. And I’d never seen John and Yoko looking more content and in love.

It was that rarest, most precious thing in life—a perfect moment.

It would also, as fate would have it, be John’s last New Year’s Eve.

John, however, obviously couldn’t just waltz into FAO Schwarz, especially right before Christmas Eve, when it was packed elbow-to-elbow with shoppers. But one year, when Sean was barely a toddler, John asked me to call the store and see if they could shut down for an hour or two so that he could do a little last-minute gift buying. Not surprisingly, the management was not crazy about the idea. Closing its doors in the middle of their busiest sales season so that one celebrity—even a former Beatle—could purchase a few thousand dollars’ worth of presents was not smart business practice. But they did offer to let John into the store after its normal closing time.

I happened to be in New York that Christmas and joined John for his FAO Schwarz after-hours excursion. John was about thirty-eight at the time, but the minute we stepped through the door, he dropped about three decades. He literally became a kid again.

As part of the decorations, there was a giant toy train track suspended from the ceiling and snaking around the store—it must have been fifty yards long—with big, chunky Lionel locomotives huffing and puffing along its rails.

“That! Let’s get that!” John exclaimed the second he saw it.

“And where would you set that up in the Dakota?” I asked him. “The dining room?”

“Okay,” he said, dejected. “Maybe not that.”

Another regular conversational pit stop during our calls was the guests I was interviewing on my radio show on any given week, especially if they were rock stars. Inevitably, John would have some spirited opinions to share about his competition. One time, for instance, I casually mentioned an upcoming booking with Mick Jagger.

“Why are you interviewing him?” John asked.

The truth was, I was interviewing Jagger because he was holding a concert in L.A. to raise money for victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua. (His wife, Bianca, was Nicaraguan.) But for some reason I foolishly blurted out, “Because the Rolling Stones are probably the greatest live touring band in the world.”

“Isn’t that what they used to say about us?” John coolly replied.

“But the Beatles aren’t touring anymore,” I said, stepping on a landmine. “The Beatles as a group don’t exist anymore. And the Rolling Stones are as important a presence as anybody in rock ’n’ roll.”

“The Rolling Stones followed us!” John shouted. “Just look at the albums! Their Satanic gobbledygook came right after Sgt. Pepper. We were there first. The only difference is that we got labeled as the mop tops and they were put out there as revolutionaries. Look, Ellie,” he went on, “I spent a lot of time with Mick. We palled around in London. We go way back. But the Beatles were the revolutionaries, not the Rolling Pebbles!”

“I never think about Beatles songs,” [John] said. “I use them as me calendar. That’s how I remember when things in me life happened: I remember where I was when Paul and I wrote a song. But outside of that, I don’t give them much attention. I seldom play them. I rarely listen to them. Especially the early songs.”

The next day Yoko phoned, which, of course, was not at all surprising, since she was calling at least once a day, a pattern that I still found delightful if somewhat perplexing. What was different this time, however, was that she called to give me a warning.

“John was disappointed in you,” she said. “He was disappointed you couldn’t get him those pills.”

“Yoko,” I replied, “I never said they were pills. I told you they were injections.”

“You told me you went to a doctor, and he “gave you pills, and you lost weight,” she insisted.

“With all due respect, that’s not what I said…”

“It’s very important that whenever you make a promise to John, you must keep it,” she continued, ignoring my correction and giving me a piece of advice that would later turn out to be invaluable. “Don’t promise John anything you can’t fulfill. Never disappoint him. Because he has an issue with trust, with people being truthful.”

Still, from time to time, the topic inevitably reared its head, particularly when one of his old bandmates released a new solo album. John had complicated, mercurial feelings about his fellow Beatles, to put it mildly, and it was impossible to predict at any given moment what he might say about any of them. He loved Paul like a brother, of course, but sometimes hated him like a brother, too. The sibling rivalry between them ran soul-deep, especially whenever Paul and his new band, Wings, chalked up another hit on the charts. John was less jealous of George, but then, they’d never been as close, particularly after George convinced the Beatles to take that 1968 sojourn to India to study Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who John ultimately concluded was a phony. Of them all, only Ringo remained unscathed by John’s grudges. I can’t recall John ever uttering a negative word about the drummer. But everybody always loved Ringo.”

After lunch, we all returned to the Dakota, where I hoped the repartee might become somewhat more sparkling. Yoko and Linda paired off for a bit and chatted amiably—the two of them got along famously, bonded by the shared experience, perhaps, of being married to a Beatle—while John and Paul stood by the windows overlooking Central Park, watching as the afternoon sky turned a whiter shade of pale over Manhattan. They remained silent for long stretches, until awkwardness forced one of them to take a stab at conversation.

“Are you making any music?” Paul asked at one point.

“Well, you know, I play some stuff for me, but I’m not working on anything. Music isn’t what’s driving me at this point. It’s all about the baby. What about you?”

“Oh, I’m always recording,” Paul said. “I couldn’t live without the music in me life.”

Then, for a spell, they fell back into silence.

It seemed that these two rock ’n’ roll behemoths, men who in their youth had all but defined the zeitgeist of the ’60s—who had inspired an entire generation and redirected music’s very destiny—were now, a mere decade later, struggling to find things to say to each other.

A part of me found it sad. But then, what was I expecting? Even the best of childhood friends eventually slip into separate lives. It’s called growing up. Now they were just two old chums who no longer had all that much in common. It was unreasonable of me to presume that merely being in the same room together would somehow ignite the genius and energy of John and Paul’s initial creative partnership.

Still, on the walk back from the Dakota to the Plaza that evening, as I passed all the glimmering Christmas lights and heard snippets of holiday melodies wafting out of the few restaurants and bars that were still open and serving, I couldn’t help but think that history might have been made on this day.

“Are you making any music?” Paul had asked John.

What if John had said something like “No, but me guitar is in the next room. Let’s sit down and make some…”

God only knows what classic Lennon-McCartney creation might have been born that afternoon.

John and I did run into some trouble in Frankfurt, Germany… Somehow, the desk clerk at the airport hotel couldn’t find our reservations, and no amount of my pleading could convince him to give us some rooms. I reported the bad news to John, who’d been “hiding” in the hotel lobby by using his old disguise of staring close up at a wall.

“They have no rooms,” I said.

“They have rooms!” he said. “They always have rooms!”

“Maybe you can try?” I asked. “I mean, you are John Lennon. If anybody can get us rooms, you can.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “I can’t say, ‘I’m a Beatle: give us rooms.’ ”

“John, it’s raining outside. We can’t walk around Frankfurt in the rain all night.”

John sighed and headed towards the front desk to reluctantly play the Beatle card. For the next few minutes, I watched as he and the clerk chatted, occasionally smiled, and at one point even laughed. And then, for some reason, John pointed at me. The clerk stared in my direction, nodding furiously. A few moments later, John came over with two keys.

“I told him you were Paul McCartney,” John said. “That seemed to work.”

It worked, all right. I was given a gorgeous suite with a feather bed and a sauna. A little later, the desk manager sent up a tray of delicious snacks and a bottle of wine. Life as Paul McCartney was clearly good.

But then, early in the morning, John was at my door, looking tired and miserable. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “This place is such a dive. They gave me a bloody closet.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “This place is great!”

John stepped into the suite, surveyed its opulence, and his jaw practically hit the floor.

“I guess the desk manager liked the “fact that I wrote ‘Yesterday,’ ” I joked.

John didn’t laugh.

Hmm, so according to Elliott Mintz, Yoko insists that it was Paul’s idea to convince John to win Yoko back… not quite how Paul tells it

What John didn’t know about that surprise encounter, though, was that, according to Yoko, Paul had an ulterior motive for the visit. A few days earlier, she had called me to explain the machinations behind the visit.

Yoko told me she spoke with Paul, who offered to speak with John.

“That’s very generous,” I responded. “How “did you react to his offer?”

“I thought it was very kind,” she said. “I was very appreciative. But I made it very clear to Paul that it wasn’t something I was asking him to do. It would have to be Paul’s idea, not mine, something Paul was doing on his own.”

As far as Yoko was concerned, she owed John no effort at rapprochement. If he wanted to come back to her, he would have to take the initiative. He’d have to be clean and sober and prove he was ready.”