Lennon's adultery pact: When John left Yoko for a year of reckless debauchery he told her 'you must take a lover too'
During their first four years together as a couple, John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent virtually every minute of every day together.
Though they continued to exhilarate each other on a creative level, their physical relationship inevitably lost some of its initial blaze.
John's sexual drive remained as intense as ever, but Yoko was finding herself less able, or inclined, to deal with it.
She was an increasingly unresponsive lover and John taunted her that she was like a Victorian wife - 'you just lie there and think of England'.
He had expected it to go away when he hooked up with Yoko, but it hadn't.
'I don't understand it,' he would tell her. 'I'm madly in love with you, but why do I still keep looking at girls in the street?'
He wasn't just looking. In New York, where they lived, they were invited to a party at the home of a Left-wing activist on the night of Richard Nixon's re- election to the White House in 1972.
Upset at Nixon winning again, John was totally out of his head on drugs, pills and drink.
Yoko recalls a girl there, 'not the kind you'd ever think John would be attracted to. She didn't come on to him at all, but he just pulled her and went into the next room'.
As the grunts and groans of her husband having sex with another woman came through the wall, somebody put on a Bob Dylan record to try to drown the noise and spare Yoko's blushes 'but we heard it anyway'.
She tried to stay calm, and asked one of her assistants to go in with a flower for John and tell him she still loved him.
The assistant, understandably, refused, and Yoko was left with much to think about.
'That situation really woke me up,' said Yoko.
She and John had sacrificed a lot to be together and it was worth it because they were so much in love.
But there was much else currently absorbing them and so the matter rested there for the present.
Outside the bedroom, their relationship seemed as frantically fruitful as ever.
They were both writing songs for new albums, and his latest lyrics abounded with adoring references to Yoko - 'I'm a fish and you're the sea'; 'Today I love you more than yesterday'; and 'Wherever you are, you are here'.
But John's sexual restlessness could not be ignored - and one day Yoko decided to confront it.
She remembers: 'We made love and it was very good - he was very good. It had nothing to do with the quality of the lovemaking.
'Then I said: "Look, John, are we going to be one of those old conservative couples who are together just because we're married?"'
They agreed it would do their relationship no harm if John had other sexual partners.
Surprisingly, apart from that one drunken lapse at the election night party, he had never been unfaithful to Yoko and, even with her compliance, he had no idea how to go about it.
He talked enviously about a fellow British rock star who simply went to the bar at the Plaza Hotel each night and sat there until some young woman picked him up and they adjourned to a suite.
'So do you want me to call the Plaza?' Yoko asked.
John said: 'Are you kidding? You're Mrs Lennon, how could you think that?'
'Well, what do you want then?' Yoko replied.
There was then some discussion, albeit not very serious, of whether he should stick to his own gender.
'John said: "It would hurt you like crazy if I made it with a girl. With a guy, maybe you wouldn't be hurt, because that's not competition. But I can't make it with a guy because I love women too much, and I'd have to fall in love with the guy and I don't think I can." '
Though eager to accept the sexual freedom Yoko was offering, John felt squeamish about doing anything under her nose in New York.
The problem was that, since his earliest days as a Beatle, he had never travelled anywhere alone or had to fend for himself.
Somebody would have to go with him. Yoko looked over the various young females in their circle and chose May Pang, a 22-year-old Chinese American who worked as an assistant to both of them.
She was good at her job, and extremely pretty.
'I said to John: "What about May?" He said: "Oh no, not May!" - but it was like he doth protest too much. I went to May and said: "You have to accompany John to LA because I have things to do here."'
'I didn't say: "Do it" or anything like that. It was just to be an assistant, to go there. But I knew what might happen, because he was never without somebody, never on his own.'
On John's side, the possessiveness and jealousy that had dominated and sometimes soured his relationship with Yoko disappeared completely - or seemed to.
If he was to be let off the leash, then so should she. He insisted that during their separation she must go out with other men so both of them would be equally guilty - and because he'd read that women who did not stay sexually active ran a higher risk of cancer.
He said he'd feel more comfortable if any affair she had was with a brother musician.
They even discussed a candidate, guitarist David Spinozza.
'David's so beautiful,' John said. 'I wouldn't mind having sex with him myself.'
So John flew to Los Angeles with May Pang, for what May thought would be a two-week stay.
A friend, former disc jockey Elliot Mintz, met them at the airport. To media interviewers, John said he and Yoko were simply taking a break from each other and there was nothing wrong with their marriage.
But to Mintz he told a different story. He said the separation was permanent and there was no suggestion that it was by mutual agreement.
'He said she'd kicked him out and he didn't know when or even if they'd be getting back together.'
John was to call the next 14 months his Lost Weekend, borrowing the title of Billy Wilder's film about alcoholism and urban loneliness.
Like that film, alcohol certainly loomed large in John's West Coast odyssey, as did loneliness and self-loathing.
'I hadn't been a bachelor since I was 20 or something, and I thought, Whoopee!' he would recall. But the reality of life without Yoko was 'god-awful'.
'He called her every day, saying: "When can I come home?"
'She'd also call me every day, to see how he was doing and check that he wasn't harming himself or making a fool of himself, though she certainly wasn't looking to get him back.
'Most of the time, John was in denial. But when he got drunk or high, he couldn't stop talking about her and how much he needed her.
'All the time it was, "What do I have to do to get out of here and back to her?" '
Yoko, too, found the separation hard, but was determined not to weaken. 'I'd never been without him before, and for the first two weeks after he'd gone, my whole body was shaking.
But I didn't tell him that because he would have come back.
'I thought: "I have to get over this because I can't be in a position where my existence relies on being with somebody." '
Particularly when that somebody was as mixed-up and difficult as John.
On the telephone, his mood would veer between euphoria at his new-found freedom and reproachful homesickness.
When things were going well in LA, he'd tell Yoko: 'Oh, you're such a great, great wife, I can't believe it.'
But when things went wrong, he blamed her. 'How could you send me out here?'
He telegrammed a friend that 'Yoko and me are in hell'.
May Pang's precise role in the scenario would never be clear, least of all to May herself.
In the book she subsequently wrote, called Loving John, she portrayed herself as a young woman of strong Catholic scruples who was at first scandalised by the suggestion that she become John's mistress - even though, by her own account, they had already had a surreptitious fling in New York.
Everybody who came to know them as a couple remembers May as kind, sweet and almost supernaturally unselfish.
She was a wholly positive influence at a time when John most needed it.
Yet as Mintz recalls, she never quite attained the status of a rock star's 'old lady'.
One day John would be all over her in public, the next she would seem no more than his PA.
And there was never a moment when she did not feel that Yoko, back in New York, was watching, even directing, the plot's development.
Another of John's friends, photographer Bob Gruen, said: 'It wasn't like he left his wife for the mistress. He left his wife for wild times that his secretary oversaw.'
May was indisputably John's only public female companion during the Lost Weekend.
But privately, Gruen reckons, there were dozens of other women, who thereafter 'would really treasure that hour, that ten minutes, that night with John Lennon'.
Let off the lead, John 'hit the bottle like I was 19 or 20'. Los Angeles provided lots of dangerous drinking companions, such as the singer Harry Nilsson and The Who drummer Keith Moon.
'When he was in that state and a fan spotted him and came over for an autograph, it was pitiful,' Mintz remembers.
'This was the Beatle who had lifted us onto a higher plane of consciousness with his lyrics, and here he was spilling drink on his trousers and not able to form a coherent sentence.
'The look of letdown on people's faces was terrible.'
He even drank in the recording studio, a flagon of vodka at his feet, something he'd never done during his whole career as a Beatle.
John was now working with the legendary Motown record producer Phil Spector, who would arrive at the studio ostentatiously flashing a pistol in a shoulder holster.
One night, to emphasise that he would brook no artistic arguments, Spector drew the pistol and fired it into the air.
'Listen, Phil,' said Lennon, 'if you're gonna kill me, kill me, but don't mess with me ears. I need 'em.'
The session musicians who had to endure all this became progressively unhappier about what was being put on tape.
'There were some flashes of brilliance - with Phil and John working together, there had to be,' said one, 'but mostly the music crashed and burned.'
As did John. He had to be restrained during one session when the cocktail of vodka and 100-proof rock 'n' roll unlocked all his pent-up anguish over Yoko and he went berserk.
'He was lashing out at people and screaming her name,' one musician remembers.
In the car taking him back to the home he had borrowed from a friend, he had to be held down to stop him kicking out the vehicle's windows.
When they got there, he was trussed up with neckties to immobilise him while May fled to seek refuge in a hotel.
Escaping his flimsy bonds, John went on a rampage through the house, breaking furniture and uprooting a palm tree.
Yoko, meanwhile, was happily adjusting to single life. She was producing art and music with her usual energy.
She and John spoke constantly on the telephone - May Pang once counted 23 calls in a single day, some running into hours.
Through Mintz, acting as go-between, John continued to make clear how desperately he wanted to return, but the answer that always came back from Yoko was: 'He isn't ready yet.'
Eventually, John headed back to New York, ostensibly so he could help his drinking partner, Nilsson, finish recording an album away from the distractions of Los Angeles.
May came with him and they set up home in a small penthouse apartment overlooking the river.
To Bob Gruen, it became increasingly clear that John no longer wished to be with her.
All the time, he was maintaining constant contact with Yoko and would regularly slip away to visit her at their apartment, even though she continued to say he was 'not ready' to come back permanently.
'It was very nice,' Yoko remembers. 'John would tell me all sorts of funny stories about the girl he'd met the night before and how it didn't go well, and I'd be saying what happened to me.
'We'd be laughing like crazy because both of us had bad times dating. I thought: "This is great. We're just going to be great friends."'
John was once more urging her to have affairs. 'Have sex, have sex,' he kept saying.
She protested that she didn't know how to find a partner. She had even taken up Chinese astrology and numerology in the hope that they would help her find someone.
John had a simpler solution. She should just go up to a man she fancied and say: 'Do you wanna f***?'
Yoko saw through this. 'He knew I could never do anything like that. I realised that what he was really saying was that he didn't want me to come on to another person romantically.'
It was just sex she needed, he advised her.
He was so insistent that she finally picked up the phone and rang a musician John thought would be suitable for her for this purpose.
'But he sounded so high that I just hung up. Other people John suggested I didn't like because they were heavy meat-eaters.
'John said: "Oh, Yoko - if you're so particular, you're never going to find anybody." '
Which was perhaps what he really wanted all along.
It was Elton John who finally brought them back together. He was the great pop sensation in America that year, on tour and assaulting the U.S. charts just as The Beatles had done a decade earlier.
They had met in Los Angeles, and John took to him immediately.
He envied Elton's facility as a songwriter and his virtuoso piano playing.
Nor was he totally averse to the camp private world of Elton and his circle, where men were commonly referred to as 'she' and nicknames like Sharon and Ada freely bestowed.
John they called 'Catherine'. John had promised Elton that he would sing with him at the last concert on his tour at Madison Square Garden, and there was to be no wriggling out of it.
Not so long ago, with Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band at his side, he would have walked into any arena with anyone.
But now he found the prospect of facing a new, young, glam-rock audience, never mind competing with such a mythic showman and extrovert as Elton, terrifying.
There was no official announcement of his appearance, but rumours were rife and Elton's people were besieged by illustrious claimants for the VIP front rows.
One of the first was from Yoko, insisting she wanted to be near the stage but out of John's direct sight line.
And no one must let him know she intended to be there.
At the last moment he almost chickened out but old Beatle campaign reflexes triumphed and he reported backstage on schedule in a plain black suit, looking as if he were about to mount the scaffold.
A messenger arrived with two boxes, one for him and one for Elton.
Each contained a white gardenia from Yoko.
'Thank goodness she's not here,' John said as he waited nervously, so racked with stage fright that he threw up.
'Otherwise I know I'd never be able to go out there.'
When he finally walked on, the whole audience leapt to their feet. 'He got a terrific reception,' Yoko remembers, 'but when he bowed, it was too quickly and too many times.
And suddenly I thought: "He looks so lonely up there." '
But to the audience he seemed back in his element, and by the time the John-John partnership had finished with I Saw Her Standing There, which had been the very first track on the very first Beatles album back in 1963, Madison Square Garden was beside itself.
John Lennon would never make another stage appearance, but in this final one he never felt more loved.
Afterwards, Yoko came backstage and they sat for a long time, catching up and holding hands.
A passing photographer snapped them together, as lost in each other as two virgins on a first date.
'John was like he wanted to eat me up or something,' Yoko remembers.
'But I said: "Oh, please don't start this again."
I really didn't want to get back together, because I thought it would be the same thing all over again.'
But John kept up his campaign, begging to move back home, using every possible emotional lever.
Yoko almost succumbed when he played her an album track he had just recorded called Bless You, which was pointedly addressed to her.
'It was such a beautiful song. I cried, John cried and we hugged each other. I had to be so strong-willed about it.
'I said: "Go." He said: "OK," and didn't try to fight it.'
Another pretext for a visit was that Yoko had managed to give up smoking and he wanted to try the same method.
Again she tried to keep their meeting business-like, until he said: 'So I really burnt the bridge, right? You won't let me come back.'
She recalls: 'And it was said in such a sad way that I said: "OK, you can." I was thinking to myself: "What am I saying?" But I couldn't help it.'
• Abridged extract from JOHN LENNON: THE LIFE by Philip Norman, published by HarperCollins at £25. Copyright Philip Norman 2008.
Though they continued to exhilarate each other on a creative level, their physical relationship inevitably lost some of its initial blaze.
John's sexual drive remained as intense as ever, but Yoko was finding herself less able, or inclined, to deal with it.
She was an increasingly unresponsive lover and John taunted her that she was like a Victorian wife - 'you just lie there and think of England'.
More than friends: John Lennon with his assistant May Pang at the end of the Seventies
They often discussed the raging sexual hunger that had been so easy to indulge when he was on the road with The Beatles. He had expected it to go away when he hooked up with Yoko, but it hadn't.
'I don't understand it,' he would tell her. 'I'm madly in love with you, but why do I still keep looking at girls in the street?'
He wasn't just looking. In New York, where they lived, they were invited to a party at the home of a Left-wing activist on the night of Richard Nixon's re- election to the White House in 1972.
Upset at Nixon winning again, John was totally out of his head on drugs, pills and drink.
Yoko recalls a girl there, 'not the kind you'd ever think John would be attracted to. She didn't come on to him at all, but he just pulled her and went into the next room'.
As the grunts and groans of her husband having sex with another woman came through the wall, somebody put on a Bob Dylan record to try to drown the noise and spare Yoko's blushes 'but we heard it anyway'.
She tried to stay calm, and asked one of her assistants to go in with a flower for John and tell him she still loved him.
The assistant, understandably, refused, and Yoko was left with much to think about.
'That situation really woke me up,' said Yoko.
She and John had sacrificed a lot to be together and it was worth it because they were so much in love.
Re-united: John and Yoko Ono in 1980
'But if he wants to make it with another girl, what am I doing with him?' But there was much else currently absorbing them and so the matter rested there for the present.
Outside the bedroom, their relationship seemed as frantically fruitful as ever.
They were both writing songs for new albums, and his latest lyrics abounded with adoring references to Yoko - 'I'm a fish and you're the sea'; 'Today I love you more than yesterday'; and 'Wherever you are, you are here'.
But John's sexual restlessness could not be ignored - and one day Yoko decided to confront it.
She remembers: 'We made love and it was very good - he was very good. It had nothing to do with the quality of the lovemaking.
'Then I said: "Look, John, are we going to be one of those old conservative couples who are together just because we're married?"'
They agreed it would do their relationship no harm if John had other sexual partners.
Surprisingly, apart from that one drunken lapse at the election night party, he had never been unfaithful to Yoko and, even with her compliance, he had no idea how to go about it.
He talked enviously about a fellow British rock star who simply went to the bar at the Plaza Hotel each night and sat there until some young woman picked him up and they adjourned to a suite.
'So do you want me to call the Plaza?' Yoko asked.
John said: 'Are you kidding? You're Mrs Lennon, how could you think that?'
'Well, what do you want then?' Yoko replied.
There was then some discussion, albeit not very serious, of whether he should stick to his own gender.
'John said: "It would hurt you like crazy if I made it with a girl. With a guy, maybe you wouldn't be hurt, because that's not competition. But I can't make it with a guy because I love women too much, and I'd have to fall in love with the guy and I don't think I can." '
Though eager to accept the sexual freedom Yoko was offering, John felt squeamish about doing anything under her nose in New York.
Inseparable: With Yoko at a news conference in New York in 1973
'So then I suggested Los Angeles,' she remembers, 'and he just lit up.' The problem was that, since his earliest days as a Beatle, he had never travelled anywhere alone or had to fend for himself.
Somebody would have to go with him. Yoko looked over the various young females in their circle and chose May Pang, a 22-year-old Chinese American who worked as an assistant to both of them.
She was good at her job, and extremely pretty.
'I said to John: "What about May?" He said: "Oh no, not May!" - but it was like he doth protest too much. I went to May and said: "You have to accompany John to LA because I have things to do here."'
'I didn't say: "Do it" or anything like that. It was just to be an assistant, to go there. But I knew what might happen, because he was never without somebody, never on his own.'
On John's side, the possessiveness and jealousy that had dominated and sometimes soured his relationship with Yoko disappeared completely - or seemed to.
If he was to be let off the leash, then so should she. He insisted that during their separation she must go out with other men so both of them would be equally guilty - and because he'd read that women who did not stay sexually active ran a higher risk of cancer.
He said he'd feel more comfortable if any affair she had was with a brother musician.
They even discussed a candidate, guitarist David Spinozza.
'David's so beautiful,' John said. 'I wouldn't mind having sex with him myself.'
So John flew to Los Angeles with May Pang, for what May thought would be a two-week stay.
A friend, former disc jockey Elliot Mintz, met them at the airport. To media interviewers, John said he and Yoko were simply taking a break from each other and there was nothing wrong with their marriage.
But to Mintz he told a different story. He said the separation was permanent and there was no suggestion that it was by mutual agreement.
'He said she'd kicked him out and he didn't know when or even if they'd be getting back together.'
John was to call the next 14 months his Lost Weekend, borrowing the title of Billy Wilder's film about alcoholism and urban loneliness.
Like that film, alcohol certainly loomed large in John's West Coast odyssey, as did loneliness and self-loathing.
'I hadn't been a bachelor since I was 20 or something, and I thought, Whoopee!' he would recall. But the reality of life without Yoko was 'god-awful'.
Fab Four: But John's increasingly crazed actions in LA were a disappointment for Beatles fans
According to Mintz, from the moment John reached LA, his one thought was returning to Yoko. 'He called her every day, saying: "When can I come home?"
'She'd also call me every day, to see how he was doing and check that he wasn't harming himself or making a fool of himself, though she certainly wasn't looking to get him back.
'Most of the time, John was in denial. But when he got drunk or high, he couldn't stop talking about her and how much he needed her.
'All the time it was, "What do I have to do to get out of here and back to her?" '
Yoko, too, found the separation hard, but was determined not to weaken. 'I'd never been without him before, and for the first two weeks after he'd gone, my whole body was shaking.
But I didn't tell him that because he would have come back.
'I thought: "I have to get over this because I can't be in a position where my existence relies on being with somebody." '
Particularly when that somebody was as mixed-up and difficult as John.
On the telephone, his mood would veer between euphoria at his new-found freedom and reproachful homesickness.
When things were going well in LA, he'd tell Yoko: 'Oh, you're such a great, great wife, I can't believe it.'
But when things went wrong, he blamed her. 'How could you send me out here?'
He telegrammed a friend that 'Yoko and me are in hell'.
May Pang's precise role in the scenario would never be clear, least of all to May herself.
In the book she subsequently wrote, called Loving John, she portrayed herself as a young woman of strong Catholic scruples who was at first scandalised by the suggestion that she become John's mistress - even though, by her own account, they had already had a surreptitious fling in New York.
Everybody who came to know them as a couple remembers May as kind, sweet and almost supernaturally unselfish.
She was a wholly positive influence at a time when John most needed it.
Yet as Mintz recalls, she never quite attained the status of a rock star's 'old lady'.
One day John would be all over her in public, the next she would seem no more than his PA.
And there was never a moment when she did not feel that Yoko, back in New York, was watching, even directing, the plot's development.
Another of John's friends, photographer Bob Gruen, said: 'It wasn't like he left his wife for the mistress. He left his wife for wild times that his secretary oversaw.'
May was indisputably John's only public female companion during the Lost Weekend.
But privately, Gruen reckons, there were dozens of other women, who thereafter 'would really treasure that hour, that ten minutes, that night with John Lennon'.
Let off the lead, John 'hit the bottle like I was 19 or 20'. Los Angeles provided lots of dangerous drinking companions, such as the singer Harry Nilsson and The Who drummer Keith Moon.
Inspirational: The pair in 1968, when their relationship provided artistic ideas both used in their work
And as ever with John, just a couple of drinks changed him in an instant from irresistible charmer and jokester to surly, venom-tongued, trouble-seeking and often violent drunk. 'When he was in that state and a fan spotted him and came over for an autograph, it was pitiful,' Mintz remembers.
'This was the Beatle who had lifted us onto a higher plane of consciousness with his lyrics, and here he was spilling drink on his trousers and not able to form a coherent sentence.
'The look of letdown on people's faces was terrible.'
He even drank in the recording studio, a flagon of vodka at his feet, something he'd never done during his whole career as a Beatle.
John was now working with the legendary Motown record producer Phil Spector, who would arrive at the studio ostentatiously flashing a pistol in a shoulder holster.
One night, to emphasise that he would brook no artistic arguments, Spector drew the pistol and fired it into the air.
'Listen, Phil,' said Lennon, 'if you're gonna kill me, kill me, but don't mess with me ears. I need 'em.'
The session musicians who had to endure all this became progressively unhappier about what was being put on tape.
'There were some flashes of brilliance - with Phil and John working together, there had to be,' said one, 'but mostly the music crashed and burned.'
As did John. He had to be restrained during one session when the cocktail of vodka and 100-proof rock 'n' roll unlocked all his pent-up anguish over Yoko and he went berserk.
'He was lashing out at people and screaming her name,' one musician remembers.
In the car taking him back to the home he had borrowed from a friend, he had to be held down to stop him kicking out the vehicle's windows.
When they got there, he was trussed up with neckties to immobilise him while May fled to seek refuge in a hotel.
Escaping his flimsy bonds, John went on a rampage through the house, breaking furniture and uprooting a palm tree.
Yoko, meanwhile, was happily adjusting to single life. She was producing art and music with her usual energy.
She and John spoke constantly on the telephone - May Pang once counted 23 calls in a single day, some running into hours.
Through Mintz, acting as go-between, John continued to make clear how desperately he wanted to return, but the answer that always came back from Yoko was: 'He isn't ready yet.'
Eventually, John headed back to New York, ostensibly so he could help his drinking partner, Nilsson, finish recording an album away from the distractions of Los Angeles.
May came with him and they set up home in a small penthouse apartment overlooking the river.
To Bob Gruen, it became increasingly clear that John no longer wished to be with her.
Give peace a chance: The world-famous protest
'But she was the one who ran his life, made all his arrangements. He told me: "I don't know how to get rid of her 'cause she's my phone book." ' All the time, he was maintaining constant contact with Yoko and would regularly slip away to visit her at their apartment, even though she continued to say he was 'not ready' to come back permanently.
'It was very nice,' Yoko remembers. 'John would tell me all sorts of funny stories about the girl he'd met the night before and how it didn't go well, and I'd be saying what happened to me.
'We'd be laughing like crazy because both of us had bad times dating. I thought: "This is great. We're just going to be great friends."'
John was once more urging her to have affairs. 'Have sex, have sex,' he kept saying.
She protested that she didn't know how to find a partner. She had even taken up Chinese astrology and numerology in the hope that they would help her find someone.
John had a simpler solution. She should just go up to a man she fancied and say: 'Do you wanna f***?'
Yoko saw through this. 'He knew I could never do anything like that. I realised that what he was really saying was that he didn't want me to come on to another person romantically.'
It was just sex she needed, he advised her.
He was so insistent that she finally picked up the phone and rang a musician John thought would be suitable for her for this purpose.
'But he sounded so high that I just hung up. Other people John suggested I didn't like because they were heavy meat-eaters.
'John said: "Oh, Yoko - if you're so particular, you're never going to find anybody." '
Which was perhaps what he really wanted all along.
It was Elton John who finally brought them back together. He was the great pop sensation in America that year, on tour and assaulting the U.S. charts just as The Beatles had done a decade earlier.
They had met in Los Angeles, and John took to him immediately.
He envied Elton's facility as a songwriter and his virtuoso piano playing.
Nor was he totally averse to the camp private world of Elton and his circle, where men were commonly referred to as 'she' and nicknames like Sharon and Ada freely bestowed.
John they called 'Catherine'. John had promised Elton that he would sing with him at the last concert on his tour at Madison Square Garden, and there was to be no wriggling out of it.
Not so long ago, with Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band at his side, he would have walked into any arena with anyone.
But now he found the prospect of facing a new, young, glam-rock audience, never mind competing with such a mythic showman and extrovert as Elton, terrifying.
There was no official announcement of his appearance, but rumours were rife and Elton's people were besieged by illustrious claimants for the VIP front rows.
One of the first was from Yoko, insisting she wanted to be near the stage but out of John's direct sight line.
And no one must let him know she intended to be there.
At the last moment he almost chickened out but old Beatle campaign reflexes triumphed and he reported backstage on schedule in a plain black suit, looking as if he were about to mount the scaffold.
A messenger arrived with two boxes, one for him and one for Elton.
Each contained a white gardenia from Yoko.
'Thank goodness she's not here,' John said as he waited nervously, so racked with stage fright that he threw up.
'Otherwise I know I'd never be able to go out there.'
When he finally walked on, the whole audience leapt to their feet. 'He got a terrific reception,' Yoko remembers, 'but when he bowed, it was too quickly and too many times.
And suddenly I thought: "He looks so lonely up there." '
But to the audience he seemed back in his element, and by the time the John-John partnership had finished with I Saw Her Standing There, which had been the very first track on the very first Beatles album back in 1963, Madison Square Garden was beside itself.
John Lennon would never make another stage appearance, but in this final one he never felt more loved.
Afterwards, Yoko came backstage and they sat for a long time, catching up and holding hands.
A passing photographer snapped them together, as lost in each other as two virgins on a first date.
'John was like he wanted to eat me up or something,' Yoko remembers.
'But I said: "Oh, please don't start this again."
I really didn't want to get back together, because I thought it would be the same thing all over again.'
But John kept up his campaign, begging to move back home, using every possible emotional lever.
Yoko almost succumbed when he played her an album track he had just recorded called Bless You, which was pointedly addressed to her.
'It was such a beautiful song. I cried, John cried and we hugged each other. I had to be so strong-willed about it.
'I said: "Go." He said: "OK," and didn't try to fight it.'
Another pretext for a visit was that Yoko had managed to give up smoking and he wanted to try the same method.
Again she tried to keep their meeting business-like, until he said: 'So I really burnt the bridge, right? You won't let me come back.'
She recalls: 'And it was said in such a sad way that I said: "OK, you can." I was thinking to myself: "What am I saying?" But I couldn't help it.'
• Abridged extract from JOHN LENNON: THE LIFE by Philip Norman, published by HarperCollins at £25. Copyright Philip Norman 2008.
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