“All I want is truth. Just gimme some truth,” John Lennon sang on his 1971 hit album Imagine. Years after the former Beatle’s assassination on December 8, 1980, biographers, music critics, and fans are still searching for the truth about this enigmatic, complicated man. When Lennon enjoyed worldwide fame as a member of the Beatles (the pioneering British rock group popular in the mid- to late 1960’s) and later as a solo artist, his life was scrutinized—and at times, roundly criticized—by the media. He and his wife, artist Yoko Ono, grabbed their share of headlines when they appeared nude on the cover of their Two Virgins album released in 1968. They also caused a stir in the spring of 1969 when they conducted a series of “bed-ins” protesting the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. Their high-profile activism and escapades came to an end in 1976, however, when Lennon slipped into seclusion behind the walls of his home in the Dakota, the posh New York City apartment building where he, his family, and a retinue of servants lived. He claimed that he wanted to devote his time to his wife and their new son, Sean. For the next five years, Lennon maintained his low profile, rarely performing or recording. Lennon and Ono, both masters at manipulating their public personas, crafted an image of Lennon as a happy househusband who padded around their apartment baking bread and raising Sean while Ono ran the Lennon empire.
This myth of domestic bliss is called into question by Robert Rosen’s controversial biography. Rosen characterizes Lennon as a prisoner of his own fame, struggling with drug addiction, bulimia, his resentment against his former partner Paul McCartney, his tumultuous marriage, and his lack of spiritual and emotional discipline. It is a sad portrait of an artist who has lost his creative drive and, as a result, his direction in life.
Rosen claims that his portrayal of Lennon’s last years is in part based on the musician’s own diaries, which came into Rosen’s possession under bizarre circumstances. Shortly after Lennon’s death, Fred Seaman, Ono’s personal assistant and Rosen’s friend, approached the author about writing an unauthorized biography of Lennon. Seaman leaked confidential information to Rosen, which the author carefully recorded in his notes. In May of 1981, Seaman stole Lennon’s original journals from the Dakota apartment and gave them to Rosen. Rosen says he worked for months transcribing every detail. Needing a break from his exhausting work, he left on a vacation to Jamaica. When he returned, his apartment had been ransacked and the diaries and his notes were gone. It was later determined that Seaman had stolen the journals back from Rosen after Ono had fired him. Rosen then began the arduous process of reconstructing the lost material entirely from memory.
That reconstruction forms the nucleus of Nowhere Man—a book Rosen describes in his introduction as a “work of both investigative journalism and imagination.” He further states, “I have used my memory of Lennon’s diaries as a roadmap to the truth. But I have used no material from the diaries.” His disclaimer no doubt is meant to deflect any legal action on the part of the Lennon estate. The diaries were returned to Ono, and she has said that she will not allow them to be released to the public until the principal players are deceased.
Rosen mentions that his sources include interviews with people who were close to Lennon; the former Beatle’s music and published books; information gleaned by traveling to places Lennon lived or vacationed; and books, magazines, and newspaper articles—all legitimate sources for any biographer. However, his warning that imagination played an important role in his portrait of Lennon prepares the reader for the interweaving of fact and fiction that is to come. Thus, his book is not a true biography, but an interpretive re-creation of Lennon’s life.
The imaginative aspect of Rosen’s book will disappoint readers who desire a more factual treatment of one of the most influential rock and roll musicians of the twentieth century. One creative device Rosen uses is to begin and end the book with “fantasies,” an apparent pun on the title of Lennon’s Double Fantasy album released in 1980. These inventions are seemingly meant to reveal the true nature of Lennon’s psyche. The first represents Lennon as a contemporary imitator of Christ, walking the streets of modern-day Jerusalem; the second finds him alive a month after his supposed assassination, reflecting on what his life would have been like had the Beatles never attained celebrity. The messianic implications of these brief chapters call to mind Lennon’s notorious comment made in 1966 that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” and also reflect Lennon’s later, brief conversion to fundamentalist Christianity. Neither fantasy, however, offers fresh insight into Lennon’s personality. Instead, both seem superfluous to the story sandwiched between them.
In another misguided attempt to convey what “it was like to be John Lennon,” Rosen devotes an entire chapter to Lennon’s dream life. Lennon believed in and tried to cultivate what is known as lucid dreaming, the ability to control and program one’s dreams. Rosen records that at one point Lennon spent as much as sixteen hours a day asleep. He also speculates on the content of Lennon’s dreams, which he asserts were often sexual in nature. Rosen comments in his introduction:
In rare instances vital information, such as the details of Lennon’s dreams, could be neither extrapolated from the public record nor found in an independent source. In those cases, I’ve used my imagination as best I could to recreate [sic] the texture and flavor of Lennon’s life.
Although this caveat speaks for itself, it also serves to make the reader suspicious of any factual information Rosen includes in the chapter. How far does he let his imagination take him? Is the material he worked from so thin that he feels it necessary to flesh it out with conjecture?
The previous questions are crucial to judging the quality of Rosen’s work. Most chapters are brief, some only half a page long. Yet they often contain more filler than fact. A primary example is the chapter entitled “The Book of Numbers.” Ono was deeply involved in the occult, and under her influence Lennon also became a believer. They ran their lives by the mercury retrograde charts, daily consulted their own personal tarot card reader, and practiced magic. Lennon also became interested in numerology. Beginning with the number nine, Rosen details Lennon’s obsession with numbers and demonstrates how certain numbers figured into his life. Rosen notes that the Lennons “would not so much as dial a telephone number without first consulting their bible, Cheiro’s Book of Numbers” and, starting with John’s October 9 birth date, goes on to calculate the various numerical values attached to letters that make up John’s nicknames and the names of those closest to him. Rosen’s analysis succeeds in showing how Lennon’s enslavement to numerology revealed his deep insecurity and his intense desire to gain self-knowledge. However, Rosen’s meticulous calculations become tedious after the first few pages, and by chapter’s end it is difficult to ferret out any further insights from the maze of numbers and letters one has just traveled through.
Although hard information is sparse, Rosen’s creative interpretation successfully conveys the sadness, pain, and confusion that permeated Lennon’s last years. In one poignant passage, Rosen makes Lennon’s love for Sean tangible when he describes a nocturnal visit he made to his son’s bedroom:
John poked his head into Sean’s room and stood in the doorway watching him sleep. Sometimes tears welled in his eyes. Sean looked so peaceful. Even after four years, John still couldn’t believe he really had a son like Sean. As long as Sean was okay, it didn’t matter what else happened. Every day was a miracle.
Lennon’s relationship with Ono was more complicated, characterized by a deep longing and pain-filled love. Lennon had come from a broken home, was raised by his mother’s sister, and was reconciled with his mother a few years before she died in a car accident. Her passing devastated him. In Ono, he found not only a wife and lover, but also a substitute for the parent he had lost. “Mother,” his nickname for his wife, was an emotionally loaded word for Lennon. It represented both the nurturing and controlling aspects of a woman’s character. Ono possessed both these traits but tended to be more controlling than nurturing. Her calculating ways caused Lennon to leave her for eighteen months and live with May Pang, Ono’s former secretary. Yet Lennon could not forget Ono, and after he returned to her, she became pregnant with their son. By 1980, their marriage was again on a downward spiral. Lennon and Sean went to Bermuda on a vacation, and as Rosen observes, Lennon realized he “was missing Mother very badly.” He called her and asked her to come to them. At first she refused, ostensibly because the stars and planets were not right for the trip. Then she relented, but left shortly after she arrived. Later it was discovered Ono was having an affair with another man. Rosen captures Lennon’s confusion and pain when he notes:
Cut off from Mother, he felt adrift, frightened, insecure. Everything was going wrong. Why did Yoko first flatly refuse to come to Bermuda, then stay for less than two days? Why was she now unwilling to speak to him on the telephone? Was she again punishing him for his sins with May Pang? Or for other sins he did not even know about?
The love story that began in the late 1960’s and endured so many ups and downs was now finally falling apart. Lennon expressed his anguish in “Losing You,” a song that ultimately appeared on Double Fantasy.
Uncovering the truth is the main objective of biographers, but there are many facets of truth. Other writers have offered their own perspectives on John Lennon’s life, including Albert Goldman in The Lives of John Lennon (1988), John Green in Dakota Days (1983), and, ironically, Rosen’s old friend Fred Seaman in The Last Days of John Lennon (1991). A competing biography, Lennon in America, published in the same year as Rosen’s book by Beatle expert Geoffrey Giuliano, is also purported to be based on Lennon’s lost diaries. While Robert Rosen has contributed another tile in the mosaic representing Lennon’s life and legacy, his biography is far from definitive. The information he presents is not new and can be found in some of the books mentioned above. His imaginative approach to the material, however, is original and may offer some fresh insight into Lennon’s eccentric, erratic life. If readers want a fuller, more accurate portrait of John Lennon, however, they would do well to check out other resources in addition to Rosen’s book.