Info The unknown Lennon (IV) No writer knows more about The Beatles than Philip Norman - and, as he prepared his definitive new biography of John Lennon, he was given hours of astonishingly frank interviews by the star's widow, Yoko Ono. The result is an entirely fresh and revealing portrait of a very flawed but lovable man. Here, in the third of four extracts, Norman shows how Lennon's life was transformed by the birth of his son Sean... There is an enduring legend, largely fuelled by disgruntled ex-employees with axes to grind, that, in his latter years, John Lennon became a virtual recluse. Holed up in his vast apartment in the Dakota, a forbiddingly gothic mansion block in New York, the most famous member of The Beatles supposedly came to resemble Howard Hughes, the eccentric tycoon who never cut his hair and nails and lived in a sanitised hotel suite for fear of catching germs. John and Yoko with baby Sean, the cause of arguably the biggest outlook change in Lennon's life Inviting as this image is, it just isn't true. What is true, however, is that the John of these times was a very different person from either the zany pop star or the drugged-out, spaced-out, wild man of rock he had been. For the first time in his life he had responsibilities. When he and his wife, Yoko Ono, got back together in 1975 after a 14-month separation, they renewed their wedding vows. Dressed in white, in a candlelit ceremony in an all-white room surrounded by banks of white carnations, it was as if they were being born again. John had come home from what he referred to as his 'Lost Weekend' with all the demons seemingly exorcised from his system - the drunkenness, the sexual ravenousness, the jealousy and possessiveness. Everything but the insecurity and self-doubt, the products of his Liverpool childhood, that nothing and no one could change. Yoko, too, seemed different: less relentless in driving her own career forward and more able, as John was, to enjoy the moment. They picked up where they had left off, but with a deeper level of love - and liking - between them. They were better friends than ever. And better in bed, where his insatiability and her lack of passion had been one of the reasons for their split. 'When John came back, we had great sex,' Yoko recalls, 'and immediately I became pregnant.' This was a shock. Earlier on in their relationship, Yoko - who had a daughter from a previous marriage - had had life-threatening miscarriages and she and John had given up hope of ever having a child together. At first, she was not sure she wanted to go through with it - or that John would - and was prepared to have an abortion. 'I didn't want to trap him. I wanted him to be here because he wanted to. I said: "It's up to you." 'John replied: "We're gonna have it, we're gonna have it..." I wanted to make it up to him for all the suffering of the separation. He wanted the baby and so I was determined to have it.' Yoko was 42, an age then considered dangerously late for child-bearing. With her history, the doctor advised that to be absolutely safe she ought to remain in bed throughout her pregnancy. John treated her with a tenderness and solicitude that would have astonished his first wife, Cynthia, mother of his son, Julian, then 12. He waited on her hand and foot, refusing to let her lift or carry anything. They decided on a natural birth without drugs or surgery but, in the event, the baby was born by Caesarean section. The delivery was difficult, and John waited in another room, badgered by insensitive hospital staff wanting autographs. 'Then I hear this crying. I'm paralysed, thinking: "Maybe it's someone else's." But it was ours. And I was jumping around and swearing at the top of my voice and kicking the wall with joy, shouting: "F***ing great!" ' It was a boy. Happy family: Yoko Ono and son Sean aged six 'I just sat all night looking at him, saying: "Wow!"' John would recall. They named him Sean, the Irish version of John, meaning 'gift from God'. Before Sean's birth, John had not been acting like a man contemplating giving up his work. On the contrary, he seemed to be deriving more pleasure and satisfaction from the music business than since his earliest Beatle days. But, afterwards, he made no attempt to renew the contract with his record company. 'We decided,' says Yoko, 'well, mainly John decided, that he was going to raise Sean and I was going to look after the business. 'He had read somewhere that Paul McCartney had made $25 million. I said: "OK, I'll try to make the same, but it's going to take me at least two years." ' The deal they made was that they would both stop any kind of creative work, whether it was writing, recording or art. John would be a house husband while Yoko would take on the full-time job of building up their finances. The anti-materialist, anti-commercial artist morphed seamlessly into an astute businesswoman. She says she was far from happy about leaving the parenting to John. In her previous marriage, she had lost out to her husband in the upbringing of her child, and she was reluctant to make the same mistake again. Style gurus: John Lennon with Yoko Ono at London Airport But she was equally worried that if she formed too close a bond with the new baby, John's old obsessive jealousy might return. She wanted to make sure that Sean would be loved by John 'as a joyful addition to our family and not hated as a hindrance to our relationship as husband and wife'. For John, being a full-time, full-on father was a revelation. Like many before him, he realised that the cure for a void in one's childhood - of the sort that he experienced when both his parents abandoned him - is not to be looked after, but to look after somebody else. Making a child's life secure makes one's own feel more secure. Gone, along with the drugging and hell-raising, were the adolescent selfishness, short attention span and abhorrence of practicalities that rock stars are prone to. He was determined to be there for Sean, remembering how his own father had not been for him, and how he had similarly neglected his first son, Julian. A Christmas greeting from John Lennon and Yoko Ono Though a nanny was employed, John always hovered nearby, ready to do anything needful, convinced that only he really knew how to do it properly. Even nappy changing, a grim horror he had refused to do in Julian's babyhood because it made him retch, was no problem this time around. Nature stepped in, transforming what he expected to be disgust and resentment into tenderness and joy. 'The only part both of us found really hard was waking up in the night for feeds,' Yoko remembers. 'We couldn't handle it because neither of us was that way. So John said: "Let's just drink cognac to relax ourselves," and that's what we did.' Getting Sean to sleep was his special responsibility. He would sit beside the cot stroking an acoustic guitar and softly singing some old Mersey folk air like Liverpool Lou. People always claim John gave up making music in this time,' says his photographer friend Bob Gruen, 'but he didn't. He was singing lullabies to his child. When he bottle-fed Sean, he'd put a rock 'n' roll record and dance around with him in his arms.' That aside, Sean's birth did seem to dull, if never fully extinguish, the creative itch that had dominated Lennon's for so long. John and Yoko at Tittenhurst Park in 1970 He was glad to let it go. It had become burden for him, the unending cycle of next lyric, next chord sequence, next single, next album, next soaring hope and plummeting disappointment. Though no formal announcement of his retirement was made, to all intents, he had now dropped out of the music business. He even cancelled his subscription to Billboard magazine, indifferent now to who was in or out of the charts. If he had the radio on, it would be tuned to an easy-listening station. 'He wasn't trying to keep up with anyone or to surpass himself any more,' says Bob Gruen. Old cronies were dropped, and it wasn't just that he no longer went out drinking with them. He preferred not to see them at all rather than be tempted back to his former ways. Nor was it only overtly bad influences like The Who drummer Keith Moon and the singer- songwriter Harry Nilsson who found him permanently unavailable. Beatlemania: But John left the rock and roll style behind, although not to the extreme hermit degree some people suggest Mick Jagger moved into a nearby apartment but all his friendly overtures to John were ignored - an experience that even the hard-boiled Stone found hurtful. 'Does he ever call me?' Jagger complained. 'Does he ever go out? No. Changes his number every ten minutes. I've given up... just kowtowing to his bleedin' wife, probably.' It was stories like this that led to the idea that John had become a virtual recluse, walled up in his apartment, increasingly bereft of self-confidence or self-reliance and prone to weird fancies and delusions calculatedly fed to him by his wife. Like most legends, it has grains of truth, or half-truth. But, overall, this vision of a rock ' n' roll Howard Hughes is flatly contradicted by his closest friend. 'A recluse? Well, yes and no,' Bob Gruen says. 'It's true he sometimes didn't go out for days at a time, but that didn't mean he was cloistered like a hermit. 'His apartment was big enough for him to take a half-a-block walk inside his home. He was the kind of recluse who went to Bermuda when he felt like it. If ever I called him up, he always asked me to stop by.' John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison join the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at Bangor, Wales Elliot Mintz, another confidant, agrees: 'There certainly were moments in those years when John wasn't exactly the life of the party. 'He had his mood swings, as he always did, but for most of the time he was in good spirits. One certainly could never have called him a depressive. He seemed happy with the more modest, moderate way of life he'd chosen.' Nor was he lonely. Says Mintz: 'There were always people around - assistants, psychics, tarot card readers, masseurs, maids, acupuncturists, odd-job people. Going from his bedroom to the kitchen was often like walking through a subway station.' There were so many people in Lennon's entourage, in fact, that one day he grumbled about the expense of his burgeoning empire to the former Beatles roadie, Neil Aspinall. 'Imagine no possessions, John,' Neil reminded him. 'It's only a bloody song,' John retorted. Lennon was often taunted over Imagine. Elton John visited the Dakota and was astonished by the sight of Yoko's lavishly stocked wardrobe and lampooned John's most famous lyric: Imagine six apartments/ It isn't hard to do./ One is full of fur coats/ The other's full of shoes... John didn't care. Anyone who has looked after a child knows how totally it revolutionises one's life and changes one's ideas of what is and is not important. Where once he had demanded novelty and diversion every other moment, his existence now became an unchanging cycle of meal-times, bath-times and bed-times - the days crowded, demanding, often joyful and triumphant, but with little or nothing to differentiate them once they had gone. John and Yoko leave London Airport for Cannes He was a thoughtful parent. In his own upbringing, he had hated the way his Aunt Mimi used to raid his bedroom and throw away his drawings and writings, so now he treated Sean's every creative effort with the reverence due a Rembrandt. 'Even if he makes a paint mark on a napkin, I keep it,' visitors were told. 'It's Sean. It's part of him.' As he grew, the little boy was initiated into John's world of comic voices and names, and recollections from the country named England they were going to visit together some day. But a certain epoch was never mentioned. The Fab Four One day, Sean was visiting a friend and happened to see the cartoon film Yellow Submarine on television. Afterwards, he came running back into the apartment and shouted: 'Daddy, were you a Beatle?' Sean has idyllically happy childhood memories, of him and his father doing nothing in particular together in the Dakota apartment's wide, white rooms or John playing guitar and the two of them singing: 'Popeye the sailor man, lives on the Isle of Man...' Every night when I was going to sleep, he'd say goodnight and he'd flick the light switch in the rhythm of his words, so that they'd wink in time. There was something very comforting about that.' The ultimate absurdity of the Howard Hughes analogy is that, through his son, Lennon was now more connected to ordinary people and things than at any time since before The Beatles became famous. Several times a week, he took Sean swimming at the YMCA - preferring the cheery clamour of its pool to the many luxury hotel spas within easy reach. Rather than pay an instructor, he taught Sean to swim himself, making him totally confident in the water by the age of four. He was also often to be seen in the meadows and dells of Central Park, pushing Sean's buggy or arm in arm with Yoko. He became a familiar figure at a particular coffee shop, where he would take Sean for pizza or breakfast, and at the Plaza Hotel, where they went for afternoon tea in its venerable Palm Court. Whenever he arrived, the string quartet would strike up Yesterday, blissfully unaware that it was a Lennon-McCartney song in which he'd had no input whatsoever. Occasionally, someone would stop him and say: 'Aren't you John Lennon?' and he would reply: 'I wish I had his money.' Imagine... John on the guitar Sometimes he hankered after his old life. He told Mintz he'd seen in the papers that Mick and Bianca had been at the opening of Studio 54, the new hot-shot discoclub in town, and he wondered if he should have been there too. Mintz recalls: 'It was the same when he read the bestseller lists in the New York Times Book Review, and was disappointed not to see his name. I'd say: "But you haven't written a book." "That's not the point," John would say.' But the truth is that his triumphs were now smaller ones. He learned to cook, no mean achievement given that up to then he'd never got past pouring a bowl of cornflakes and making a cup of tea. He also took up sailing, extraordinary for someone who'd never set foot in anything smaller than a Mersey ferry. Soon he was good enough to take Sean out on his own. No one noticed the modest little sailboat bucking and tacking up Long Island Sound, or the anonymous, oilskinclad figure with the little boy beside him. Of all the books he read in this period, the one that had the greatest effect was David Niven's autobiography. 'Niven had been friends with all the wild stars in Hollywood and had been to all the crazy parties but he'd come out sane at the end,' Bob Gruen says. 'John told me: "I'm gonna be David Niven." His plan was to live beyond the wild days. He was gonna be the one that survived.' Fate would decide otherwise. For a superstitious person, there had been bad omens. Yoko took John and Sean to Japan to meet her family and there John came across an old photograph of Zenjiro Yasuda, her maternal greatgrandfather, who had been a hugely powerful banker to the Emperor half a century ago. John was fascinated by Zenjiro's photograph, which seemed to bear a more than passing likeness to himself. 'That's me in a former life,' he told Yoko. 'Don't say that,' she replied. 'He was assassinated.' • Abridged extract from JOHN LENNON: THE LIFE by Philip Norman, published by HarperCollins __________________ First impressions often lead to wrong conclusions. Get Paid Just For Joining A Social Networking Site! Get Paid To Read Your Interested Emails Earn Income While You BLOG Last edited by sgelite; 08-10-2008 at 08:46 PM.

The unknown Lennon (IV) No writer knows more about The Beatles than Philip Norman - and, as he prepared his definitive new biography of John Lennon, he was given hours of astonishingly frank interviews by the star's widow, Yoko Ono. The result is an entirely fresh and revealing portrait of a very flawed but lovable man. Here, in the third of four extracts, Norman shows how Lennon's life was transformed by the birth of his son Sean... There is an enduring legend, largely fuelled by disgruntled ex-employees with axes to grind, that, in his latter years, John Lennon became a virtual recluse. Holed up in his vast apartment in the Dakota, a forbiddingly gothic mansion block in New York, the most famous member of The Beatles supposedly came to resemble Howard Hughes, the eccentric tycoon who never cut his hair and nails and lived in a sanitised hotel suite for fear of catching germs. John and Yoko with baby Sean, the cause of arguably the biggest outlook change in Lennon's life Inviting as this image is, it just isn't true. What is true, however, is that the John of these times was a very different person from either the zany pop star or the drugged-out, spaced-out, wild man of rock he had been. For the first time in his life he had responsibilities. When he and his wife, Yoko Ono, got back together in 1975 after a 14-month separation, they renewed their wedding vows. Dressed in white, in a candlelit ceremony in an all-white room surrounded by banks of white carnations, it was as if they were being born again. John had come home from what he referred to as his 'Lost Weekend' with all the demons seemingly exorcised from his system - the drunkenness, the sexual ravenousness, the jealousy and possessiveness. Everything but the insecurity and self-doubt, the products of his Liverpool childhood, that nothing and no one could change. Yoko, too, seemed different: less relentless in driving her own career forward and more able, as John was, to enjoy the moment. They picked up where they had left off, but with a deeper level of love - and liking - between them. They were better friends than ever. And better in bed, where his insatiability and her lack of passion had been one of the reasons for their split. 'When John came back, we had great sex,' Yoko recalls, 'and immediately I became pregnant.' This was a shock. Earlier on in their relationship, Yoko - who had a daughter from a previous marriage - had had life-threatening miscarriages and she and John had given up hope of ever having a child together. At first, she was not sure she wanted to go through with it - or that John would - and was prepared to have an abortion. 'I didn't want to trap him. I wanted him to be here because he wanted to. I said: "It's up to you." 'John replied: "We're gonna have it, we're gonna have it..." I wanted to make it up to him for all the suffering of the separation. He wanted the baby and so I was determined to have it.' Yoko was 42, an age then considered dangerously late for child-bearing. With her history, the doctor advised that to be absolutely safe she ought to remain in bed throughout her pregnancy. John treated her with a tenderness and solicitude that would have astonished his first wife, Cynthia, mother of his son, Julian, then 12. He waited on her hand and foot, refusing to let her lift or carry anything. They decided on a natural birth without drugs or surgery but, in the event, the baby was born by Caesarean section. The delivery was difficult, and John waited in another room, badgered by insensitive hospital staff wanting autographs. 'Then I hear this crying. I'm paralysed, thinking: "Maybe it's someone else's." But it was ours. And I was jumping around and swearing at the top of my voice and kicking the wall with joy, shouting: "F***ing great!" ' It was a boy. Happy family: Yoko Ono and son Sean aged six 'I just sat all night looking at him, saying: "Wow!"' John would recall. They named him Sean, the Irish version of John, meaning 'gift from God'. Before Sean's birth, John had not been acting like a man contemplating giving up his work. On the contrary, he seemed to be deriving more pleasure and satisfaction from the music business than since his earliest Beatle days. But, afterwards, he made no attempt to renew the contract with his record company. 'We decided,' says Yoko, 'well, mainly John decided, that he was going to raise Sean and I was going to look after the business. 'He had read somewhere that Paul McCartney had made $25 million. I said: "OK, I'll try to make the same, but it's going to take me at least two years." ' The deal they made was that they would both stop any kind of creative work, whether it was writing, recording or art. John would be a house husband while Yoko would take on the full-time job of building up their finances. The anti-materialist, anti-commercial artist morphed seamlessly into an astute businesswoman. She says she was far from happy about leaving the parenting to John. In her previous marriage, she had lost out to her husband in the upbringing of her child, and she was reluctant to make the same mistake again. Style gurus: John Lennon with Yoko Ono at London Airport But she was equally worried that if she formed too close a bond with the new baby, John's old obsessive jealousy might return. She wanted to make sure that Sean would be loved by John 'as a joyful addition to our family and not hated as a hindrance to our relationship as husband and wife'. For John, being a full-time, full-on father was a revelation. Like many before him, he realised that the cure for a void in one's childhood - of the sort that he experienced when both his parents abandoned him - is not to be looked after, but to look after somebody else. Making a child's life secure makes one's own feel more secure. Gone, along with the drugging and hell-raising, were the adolescent selfishness, short attention span and abhorrence of practicalities that rock stars are prone to. He was determined to be there for Sean, remembering how his own father had not been for him, and how he had similarly neglected his first son, Julian. A Christmas greeting from John Lennon and Yoko Ono Though a nanny was employed, John always hovered nearby, ready to do anything needful, convinced that only he really knew how to do it properly. Even nappy changing, a grim horror he had refused to do in Julian's babyhood because it made him retch, was no problem this time around. Nature stepped in, transforming what he expected to be disgust and resentment into tenderness and joy. 'The only part both of us found really hard was waking up in the night for feeds,' Yoko remembers. 'We couldn't handle it because neither of us was that way. So John said: "Let's just drink cognac to relax ourselves," and that's what we did.' Getting Sean to sleep was his special responsibility. He would sit beside the cot stroking an acoustic guitar and softly singing some old Mersey folk air like Liverpool Lou. People always claim John gave up making music in this time,' says his photographer friend Bob Gruen, 'but he didn't. He was singing lullabies to his child. When he bottle-fed Sean, he'd put a rock 'n' roll record and dance around with him in his arms.' That aside, Sean's birth did seem to dull, if never fully extinguish, the creative itch that had dominated Lennon's for so long. John and Yoko at Tittenhurst Park in 1970 He was glad to let it go. It had become burden for him, the unending cycle of next lyric, next chord sequence, next single, next album, next soaring hope and plummeting disappointment. Though no formal announcement of his retirement was made, to all intents, he had now dropped out of the music business. He even cancelled his subscription to Billboard magazine, indifferent now to who was in or out of the charts. If he had the radio on, it would be tuned to an easy-listening station. 'He wasn't trying to keep up with anyone or to surpass himself any more,' says Bob Gruen. Old cronies were dropped, and it wasn't just that he no longer went out drinking with them. He preferred not to see them at all rather than be tempted back to his former ways. Nor was it only overtly bad influences like The Who drummer Keith Moon and the singer- songwriter Harry Nilsson who found him permanently unavailable. Beatlemania: But John left the rock and roll style behind, although not to the extreme hermit degree some people suggest Mick Jagger moved into a nearby apartment but all his friendly overtures to John were ignored - an experience that even the hard-boiled Stone found hurtful. 'Does he ever call me?' Jagger complained. 'Does he ever go out? No. Changes his number every ten minutes. I've given up... just kowtowing to his bleedin' wife, probably.' It was stories like this that led to the idea that John had become a virtual recluse, walled up in his apartment, increasingly bereft of self-confidence or self-reliance and prone to weird fancies and delusions calculatedly fed to him by his wife. Like most legends, it has grains of truth, or half-truth. But, overall, this vision of a rock ' n' roll Howard Hughes is flatly contradicted by his closest friend. 'A recluse? Well, yes and no,' Bob Gruen says. 'It's true he sometimes didn't go out for days at a time, but that didn't mean he was cloistered like a hermit. 'His apartment was big enough for him to take a half-a-block walk inside his home. He was the kind of recluse who went to Bermuda when he felt like it. If ever I called him up, he always asked me to stop by.' John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison join the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at Bangor, Wales Elliot Mintz, another confidant, agrees: 'There certainly were moments in those years when John wasn't exactly the life of the party. 'He had his mood swings, as he always did, but for most of the time he was in good spirits. One certainly could never have called him a depressive. He seemed happy with the more modest, moderate way of life he'd chosen.' Nor was he lonely. Says Mintz: 'There were always people around - assistants, psychics, tarot card readers, masseurs, maids, acupuncturists, odd-job people. Going from his bedroom to the kitchen was often like walking through a subway station.' There were so many people in Lennon's entourage, in fact, that one day he grumbled about the expense of his burgeoning empire to the former Beatles roadie, Neil Aspinall. 'Imagine no possessions, John,' Neil reminded him. 'It's only a bloody song,' John retorted. Lennon was often taunted over Imagine. Elton John visited the Dakota and was astonished by the sight of Yoko's lavishly stocked wardrobe and lampooned John's most famous lyric: Imagine six apartments/ It isn't hard to do./ One is full of fur coats/ The other's full of shoes... John didn't care. Anyone who has looked after a child knows how totally it revolutionises one's life and changes one's ideas of what is and is not important. Where once he had demanded novelty and diversion every other moment, his existence now became an unchanging cycle of meal-times, bath-times and bed-times - the days crowded, demanding, often joyful and triumphant, but with little or nothing to differentiate them once they had gone. John and Yoko leave London Airport for Cannes He was a thoughtful parent. In his own upbringing, he had hated the way his Aunt Mimi used to raid his bedroom and throw away his drawings and writings, so now he treated Sean's every creative effort with the reverence due a Rembrandt. 'Even if he makes a paint mark on a napkin, I keep it,' visitors were told. 'It's Sean. It's part of him.' As he grew, the little boy was initiated into John's world of comic voices and names, and recollections from the country named England they were going to visit together some day. But a certain epoch was never mentioned. The Fab Four One day, Sean was visiting a friend and happened to see the cartoon film Yellow Submarine on television. Afterwards, he came running back into the apartment and shouted: 'Daddy, were you a Beatle?' Sean has idyllically happy childhood memories, of him and his father doing nothing in particular together in the Dakota apartment's wide, white rooms or John playing guitar and the two of them singing: 'Popeye the sailor man, lives on the Isle of Man...' Every night when I was going to sleep, he'd say goodnight and he'd flick the light switch in the rhythm of his words, so that they'd wink in time. There was something very comforting about that.' The ultimate absurdity of the Howard Hughes analogy is that, through his son, Lennon was now more connected to ordinary people and things than at any time since before The Beatles became famous. Several times a week, he took Sean swimming at the YMCA - preferring the cheery clamour of its pool to the many luxury hotel spas within easy reach. Rather than pay an instructor, he taught Sean to swim himself, making him totally confident in the water by the age of four. He was also often to be seen in the meadows and dells of Central Park, pushing Sean's buggy or arm in arm with Yoko. He became a familiar figure at a particular coffee shop, where he would take Sean for pizza or breakfast, and at the Plaza Hotel, where they went for afternoon tea in its venerable Palm Court. Whenever he arrived, the string quartet would strike up Yesterday, blissfully unaware that it was a Lennon-McCartney song in which he'd had no input whatsoever. Occasionally, someone would stop him and say: 'Aren't you John Lennon?' and he would reply: 'I wish I had his money.' Imagine... John on the guitar Sometimes he hankered after his old life. He told Mintz he'd seen in the papers that Mick and Bianca had been at the opening of Studio 54, the new hot-shot discoclub in town, and he wondered if he should have been there too. Mintz recalls: 'It was the same when he read the bestseller lists in the New York Times Book Review, and was disappointed not to see his name. I'd say: "But you haven't written a book." "That's not the point," John would say.' But the truth is that his triumphs were now smaller ones. He learned to cook, no mean achievement given that up to then he'd never got past pouring a bowl of cornflakes and making a cup of tea. He also took up sailing, extraordinary for someone who'd never set foot in anything smaller than a Mersey ferry. Soon he was good enough to take Sean out on his own. No one noticed the modest little sailboat bucking and tacking up Long Island Sound, or the anonymous, oilskinclad figure with the little boy beside him. Of all the books he read in this period, the one that had the greatest effect was David Niven's autobiography. 'Niven had been friends with all the wild stars in Hollywood and had been to all the crazy parties but he'd come out sane at the end,' Bob Gruen says. 'John told me: "I'm gonna be David Niven." His plan was to live beyond the wild days. He was gonna be the one that survived.' Fate would decide otherwise. For a superstitious person, there had been bad omens. Yoko took John and Sean to Japan to meet her family and there John came across an old photograph of Zenjiro Yasuda, her maternal greatgrandfather, who had been a hugely powerful banker to the Emperor half a century ago. John was fascinated by Zenjiro's photograph, which seemed to bear a more than passing likeness to himself. 'That's me in a former life,' he told Yoko. 'Don't say that,' she replied. 'He was assassinated.' • Abridged extract from JOHN LENNON: THE LIFE by Philip Norman, published by HarperCollins __________________ First impressions often lead to wrong conclusions. Get Paid Just For Joining A Social Networking Site! Get Paid To Read Your Interested Emails Earn Income While You BLOG Last edited by sgelite; 08-10-2008 at 08:46 PM.