TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/80/80capmil.3

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Nation

COVER STORY
The Last Day in the Life

December 22, 1980

John Lennon is shot to death at 40, and a bright dream fades

Just a voice out of the American night.  "Mr. Lennon," He started to
turn around.  There is no knowing whether John Lennon, saw, for what
would have been the second time that day, the young man in the black
raincoat stepping out of the shadows.  The first shot hit him that
fast, through the chest.  There were at least three others.

Not that night, or the next day, but a little later, after the terror
ebbed and the grief could be managed, Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, took
their five-year-old son Sean to the spot in the apartment courtyard
where she had seen his father murdered.  She had already shown Sean a
newspaper with his father's picture on the front page.  She tried to
do what everyone else has done since that Monday night.  She tried to
explain.

Like everyone else, too, the boy asked simple questions to which
there would never be simple or satisfactory answers.  If, as was
being said, the man liked his father so much, why did he shoot him?
His mother explained:  "He was probably a confused person."  Not good
enough.  Better to know.  Sean Lennon said, if he was confused or
rally meant to kill.  His mother said that was up to the courts to
decide, and Sean wanted to know which courts she was talking about:
tennis or basketball?  Then Sean cried, and he also said, "Now Daddy
is part of God.  I guess when you die you become much more bigger
because you're part of everything."

Sean did not really know or understand about the Beatles, or what
his father was to the world.  But Sean will surely know, soon enough,
that his father did not have to die to become part of everything.
Given the special burden and grace of his great gift, he already was.
Not just for his wife or son but for more people than anyone could
ever begin to number, the killing of John Lennon was a death in the
family.

For all the official records, the death would be called murder.  For
everyone who cherished the sustaining myth of the Beatles--which is
to say, for much of an entire generation that is passing, as Lennon
was, at age 40, into middle age, and coming suddenly up against its
own mortality--the murder was something else.  It was an
assassination, a ritual slaying of something that could hardly be
named.  Hope, perhaps; or idealism.  Or time.  Not only lost, but
suddenly dislocated, fractured.

The outpouring of grief, wonder and shared devastation that followed
Lennon's death had the same breadth and intensity as the reaction to
the killing of a world figure:  some bold and popular politician,
like John or Robert Kennedy, or a spiritual leader, like Martin
Luther King Jr.  But Lennon was a creature of poetic political
metaphor, and his spiritual consciousness was directed inward, as a
way of nurturing and widening his creative force.  That was what made
the impact, and the difference--the shock of his imagination, the
penetrating and pervasive traces of his genius--and it was the loss
of all that, in so abrupt and awful a way, that was mourned last
week, all over the world.  The last Day in the Life, "I read the news
today, oh boy..."

Sorrow was expressed, sympathies extended by everyone from Presidents
and Presidents-elect.  Prime Ministers and Governors and mayors to
hundreds of fans who gathered at the arched entryway to the Lennons'
Manhattan apartment building, the Dakota, crying and praying, singing
and decorating the tall gates with wreaths and single flowers and
memorial banners.  CHRISTMAS IN HEAVEN, read one.  Another recalled
the magical innovation of a childhood memory that became one of his
finest songs:  Strawberry Fields Forever.

Ring Starr flew to New York to see Yoko.  George Harrison, "shattered
and stunned,"  went into retreat at his home in Oxfordshire, England.
Paul McCartney, whom Lennon plainly loved and just as plainly hated
like the brother he never had, said, "I can't tell you how much it
hurts to lose him.  His death is a bitter, cruel blow--I really loved
the guy."  Having no wish to contribute to the hysteria that always
follows the grief at such public mournings, McCartney, who has hired
two bodyguards to protect himself and his family, said he would stay
home in Sussex, England, even if there was a funeral.  There was not.
Lennon's body was cremated in a suburban New York cemetery, and Ono
issued a statement inviting everyone "to participate from wherever
you are" in a ten-minute silent vigil on Sunday afternoon.

Before that, it had been a week of tributes.  Radio stations from New
Orleans to Boston cleared the air waves for Lennon and Beatles
retrospectives.  In Los Angeles, more than 2,000 people joined in a
candlelight vigil at Century City; in Washington, D.C., several
hundred crowded the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in a "silent
tribute" that recalled the sit-ins of the '60s.  Record stores all
over the country reported sellouts on the new Lennon-Ono album,
Double Fantasy, their first record in five years, as well as the
back stock of Lennon's previous records.

Some reaction was tragic.  A teen-age girl in Florida and a man of 30
in Utah killed themselves, leaving notes that spoke of depression
over Lennon's death.  On Thursday, Ono said, "This is not the end of
an era.  The '80s are still going to be a beautiful time, and John
believed in it."

All the brutal and finally confounding facts of the killing were
examined like runes and held up to the light like talismans, small
shards of some awful psychic puzzle.  A pudgy Georgia-born ex-
security guard from Hawaii named Mark David Chapman fired his shots
at Lennon from what the police call "combat stance":  in a stiff
crouch, one hand wrapped around the butt of his newly purchased
revolver, the other around the wrist to steady it.  As Lennon took
six staggering steps, Chapman, 25, simply stood still, and then went
with the arresting officers like a model citizen who had been
unfairly rousted on a traffic bust.  Chapman's personal history
showed, in retrospect, many ominous byways, but immediately after the
shooting, he offered no explanations.  And no regrets.

Chapman arrived in New York three days before the killing, checked
into a Y.M.C.A. nine blocks from Lennon's apartment, and started
hanging out in front of the building, waiting for Lennon like any
other fan.  There were usually fans at the gates of the Dakota, a
grand, gloomy, high-maintenance Gothic fortress overlooking the west
side of Central Park, because the building houses several
celebrities:  Lauren Becall, Roberta Flack, Leonard Bernstein.  Fans
of the Beatles and Lennon lovers accounted for the largest portion of
the curious.  Two unidentified women told an ABC television reporter
that they had fallen into conversation with Chapman outside the
Dakota.  Said one, "He just seemed like a really nice, genuine,
honest person who was there because he admired John."  Others, like
WPLJ Disc Jockey Carol Miller, who lives near the Dakota, had noticed
Chapman and thought "he looked strange.  He was older than the kids
who hung around there."  When Miller first heart that Lennon had been
shot, Chapman's face flashed in her mind.

On Saturday night, Chapman hailed a cab and told Driver Mark Snyder
to take him to Greenwich Village.  On the way he boasted that he had
just dropped off the tapes of an album John Lennon and Paul McCartney
made that day.  He said that he was the recording engineer and that
they had played for three hours.

On Monday afternoon Chapman spotted Lennon and asked him to
autograph an album.  Lennon hastily scribbled his name and climbed
into a waiting car to take him to a recording studio.  Did Chapman
feel slighted by Lennon?  Possibly.  But the night before he had
suddenly checked out of the Y and moved into the cushier Sheraton
Center hotel and bought himself a big meal.  It was as if he were
rewarding himself in advance for some proud accomplishment.  Now on
Monday, only hours after getting Lennon's autograph, Chapman was
waiting again, this time in the shadows of the entryway, with a gun.
When the police grabbed him after the shooting, they found he still
had the autographed album with him.  He also had a paperback copy of
J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.

Lennon was no stranger to threats on his life.  As early as 1964, at
the first Beatles concert in France, Lennon got a note backstage that
read, "I am going to shoot you at 9 tonight."  He had only lately
become accustomed to the freewheeling anarchy of New York street
life:  "I can go out this door now and go into a restaurant..Do you
want to know how great that is?" he told the BBC.  But friends
remember him as being guarded both in public and around the few
people he and Ono met during the long years of self-willed isolation
that were only ending with the completion of the new album.  "John
was always wary," says his friend, Actor Peter Boyle.  "Maybe partly
because he was extraordinarily tuned in.  He'd pick up on people, and
they'd pick up on him."

Lennon also shared with many other rockers a kind of operational
fatalism, a sense that ding your best, whether on record or in
concert, required laying yourself open, making yourself vulnerable.
it was not only the pressures and excesses of the rock-'n'-roll life
that moved the Who's Pete Townshend to remark, "Rock is going to kill
me somehow."  And it was not just the death of Elvis Presley that
Lennon had in mind when he said to friends in 1978, "If you stay in
this business long enough, it'll get you."

Rock, Lennon knew as well as anyone, is the applied art of big risk
and big feelings.  The songs he and Paul McCartney wrote for the
Beatles, separately and together, brought more people up against the
joy and boldness of rock music than anything else ever has.  it
wasn't just that Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein were taking the
Beatles as seriously--and a good deal more affectionately--than
Stockhausen.  The worldwide appeal of the Beatles had to do with
their perceived innocence, their restless idealism that stayed a step
or two ahead of the times and once in a while turned, bowed low, gave
the times a razz and dared to catch up.  The slow songs were heart
stoppers, the fast ones adrenaline rushes of wit, low-down love and
high, fabulous adventure.  The songs became, all together, an
orchestration of a generation's best hopes and fondest dreams.

The songs Lennon wrote later on his own--Imagine and Whatever Gets
You Thru the Night, Instant Karma and Give Peace a Chance and the
gentle and unapologetic Watching the Wheels from the new album, or
the gorgeous seasonal anthem, Happy Xmas (War is Over), which he
recorded with Ono in 1972--kept the standard high and his conscience
fine-tuned.  The political songs were all personal, the intimate
songs all singular in their fierce insistence on making public all
issues of the heart, on working some common moral out of private
pain.  Rock music is still benefitting from lessons that LEnnon
fought hard for, then passed along.  All his music seemed to be torn
from that small, stormy interior where, as Robert Frost once wrote,
"work is play for mortal stakes."

Despite the universality of interest in his death, Lennon remained
chiefly the property--one might even be tempted to say prisoner--of
his own generation.  Some--those who regarded the Beatles as a
benign cultural curiosity, and Lennon as some overmoneyed songwriter
with a penchant for political pronouncements and personal excess--
wondered what all the fuss was about and could not quite understand
why some of the junior staff at the office would suddenly break into
tears in the middle of the day.  "A garden-variety Nobel prizewinner
would not get this kind of treatment," said a teacher in Oxford,
England.  Across the Atlantic, in schools and on college campuses,
those from other generations showed almost as great a sense of
puzzlement, even distance, as of loss.  Gretchen Steininger, 16, a
junior at Evergreen Park High School in suburban Chicago, said "I
recognize the end of an era--my mom's."

So a little reminder was in order, a small history lesson, and there
was no one better to lead the class than Bruce Springsteen.  Lennon
had lately become warmly admiring of Springsteen, especially his hit
single Hungry Heart.  Springsteen could probably have let Lennon's
death pass unremarked, and few in the audience at his Philadelphia
concert last Tuesday would have been troubled.  But instead of
ripping right into the first song, Springsteen simply said, "If it
wasn't for John Lennon, a lot of us would be some place much
different tonight.  It's a hard world that asks you to live with a
lot of things that are unlivable.  And it's hard to come out here and
play tonight, but there's nothing else to do."

Then Bruce and the E Street Band tore into Springsteen's own anthem,
Born to Run, making it clear that playing was the best thing to do.
Guitarist Steve Van Zandt let the tears roll down his face, and
Organist Danny Federici hit the board so hare he broke a key.  By the
second verse, the song turned into a challenge the audience was happy
to accept:  "I wanna know love is wild, I wanna know love is real,"
Springsteen yelled, and they yelled back.  By the end, it sounded
like redemption.  John Lennon knew that sound too.  He could use it
like a chord change because he had been chasing it most of his life.

John Lennon grew up on Penny Lane, and after a time he moved to a
house outside Liverpool, hard by a boys' reformatory.  There was
another house in the neighborhood where John and his pals would go to
a party and sell lemonade bottles for a penny.  The house was called
Strawberry Fields.  His boyhood was neither as roughly working-class
as early Beatles p.r. indicated, nor quite as benign as the magical
association of those place names might suggest.  But John's
adolescence in the suburbs, the garden outside the back door and the
warm ministrations of his Auntie Mimi did not diminish either the pan
or the sense of separateness that was already stirring.

His father, a seaman named Alfred, left home shortly after John was
born, and his mother Julia sent him to her sister Mimi because, it
was said, she could not support her child.  John was 4 1/2 when he
was farmed out to the suburbs.  All the sorrow, rage and confusion of
this early boyhood were taken up again and again in songs like Julia
and Mother.  THese early years were not an unhealed wound for Lennon,
but more nearly a root, a deep psychic wellspring rom which he could
draw reserved of hard truth.

Reserves of another sort gave him trouble even early on.  "In one
way, I was always hip," Lennon remarked recently in Playboy, during
and interview that could stand as lively proof that some of the best
Lennon/Ono art was their life.  "I was hip in kindergarten.  I was
different from the others...There was something wrong with me.  I
thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn't see.  I
was always seeing things in a hallucinatory way."  Lennon's songs
made peace with those hallucinations and expanded them--when
psychedelics, psychiatry sort of domestic mysticism while keeping
them always within reach, as a man might keep a flashlight on a
nightstand in case he had to get up in the dark.

Lennon was already well into his teens, living 15 minutes away from
his mother but seldom seeing her, when rock 'n' roll grabbed hold of
him and never let loose.  All the raw glories of Elvis Presley,
Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis shook him to his
shoed.  He responded with the rowdiness of spirit and emotional
restlessness that already set him apart from his peers and caused
their parents concern.  Paul McCartney's father warned his son to
steer clear of John, which amounted to an open if inadvertent
invitation to friendship.

By his 16th year, John had formed his first band, the Quarrymen, and
Paul McCartney had enlisted as guitar player.  John and Paul began to
write songs together almost as soon as they had finished tuning up,
and they played any gig the band could get.  By the end of 1956,
though he had his first group and a best friend, Lennon suffered a
lasting wound.  His mother was killed in an accident, while she stood
waiting for a bus.  As he said, "I lost her twice."

Two years later, George Harrison had joined the Quarrymen, and the
band was actually earning some money.  They had their own fans, and a
growing reputation that took them to club dates in the gritty seaport
of Hamburg, West Germany, where they eventually changed their name to
the Beatles and got a double dose of the seamier side of rock life.
Lennon, who like the rest of the boys favored black leather jackets,
pegged pants and stomper boots, was sending long and passionate mash
notes back home to Cynthia Powell.  "Sexist letters this side of
Henry Miller," he observed.

He was also a student at the Liverpool College of Art while the
Quarrymen were still gigging around.  "I knew John would always be a
bohemian," Aunt Mimi recalled.  "But I wanted him to have some sort
of job.  Her he was nearly 21 years old, touting round stupid halls
for L3 a night.  Where was the point in that?"

Well, the point was the music, a peak-velocity transplant of American
rock, with its original blistering spirit not only restored but
exalted.  There was some concern for the future, however.  A
Liverpool record-store owner named Brian Epstein thought he might be
able to lend a hand there.  He signed on as the group's manager in
1961.  By the end of the following year, the boys got their first
record contract and their first producer, George Martin, who remained
aboard for the crazy cruise that came to be called Beatlemania.
There was one final change of personnel:  Drummer Pete Best was
replaced by a gentleman named Richard Starkey, who favored quantities
of heavy jewelry, most of it worn on the digits, and who went by the
name of Ringo Starr.

It took just a month for the second Beatles single, Please Please Me,
to reach the top of the English charts.  That was in January of 1963.
By the end of that year, they had released She Loves You and appeared
live on a BBC variety show in front of thousands of screaming fans in
the audience and unverifiable millions of new converts and dazed
parents sitting at home in front of the telly.  I Want to Hold Your
Hand came out in the U.S. in the first week of 1964, and it seemed
then for a while that both sided of the Atlantic were up for grabs.
Beatles forever.

Some history becomes myth, some myth goes down in history, some
statistics boggle the mind:  the Beatles have sold, all over the
world, upwards of 200 million records.  They made history so quickly,
and so seismically, that their chronology can be given like a code,
or an association game in which words, phrases, snatches of lyrics,
names, can stand for whole years.  Even the skeptical on either side
of the Beatles generation will be startled to see how easily they can
play along, Start off with an easy one.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Now
you're off...Ed Sullivan.  Jelly babies.  Plaza Hotel.  Moptops.
Arthur and A Hard Day's Night.  The Maharishi and M.B.E.s.  Sergeant
Pepper.  LSD.  Apple.  "More popular than Jesus."  Shea Stadium.
White Album.  Yesterday.  "I'd love to turn you on."  Jane.  Patti.
Cynthia.  Linda.  Yoko.  "Paul is dead."  Abbey Road.  Let It Be.

The history and the resonance of those fragments are so strong that
even out of chronological sequence they form their own associations,
like a Joseph Cornell collage.  Some of the colors may be
psychedelic, but the shadings are the pastel of memory, the patina
made of remembered melody.  Lennon, the only wedded Beatle--he had
married Cynthia in 1962 and had a son, Julian--had early been typed
as the most restless, outspoken and creative of the group, even
though he led, outwardly, the most settled life.  There was paradox
in this popular portrait, just as there was considerable tension in
Lennon's belief that the well-noted contradictions were true.  There
were both beauty and ambition in his music, and a full measure of
turmoil too.  He was experimenting with drugs and working up some of
the material that would eventually find its way into Sergeant
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, when he walked into a London
gallery in 1966 and there, among ladders, spyglasses, nail boards,
banners and other props of her art, met Yoko Ono.

The daughter of a well-to-do Japanese banker, Ono, now 57, was born
in Tokyo.  She had lived in San Francisco before World War II,
foraged for food back home during it, and afterward returned to the
States, where she attended Sarah Lawrence College and became
interested in the far-flung reaches of the avant-garde.  Her first
husband was a Japanese musician.  The marriage so offended Ono's
mother that she never reconciled with her daughter.  She worked on
concerts for John Cage, became associated with other artists such as
La Monte Young and Charlotte Moorman, the topless cellist whose
staging of and participation in art "events" came a little later to
be called happenings.  Ono married again, a conceptual artists named
Tony Cox, and they had a daughter, Kyoko.  Ono once brought the baby
on-stage during a concert as "an uncontrollable instrument."
Eventually, Cox and Kyoko went to Japan, and Ono to England.  Her
artworks, or happenings, began to show a sense of humor that was both
self-mocking and affirmative, and when John Lennon climbed a ladder
to look through a telescope at that London gallery, what he saw was
no distant landscape but a simple YES.

The other Beatles were not delighted to have Ono around.  Besides
whatever personal antagonisms or random jealousies might have
existed, one suspects now, Paul, George and Ringo may have considered
her dedicated avant-gardism somewhat inimical to the best popular
instincts of their music.  For her part, she felt she was under heavy
surveillance.  "I sort of went to bed with this guy that I liked and
suddenly the next morning I see these three in-laws standing there,"
she recalled recently.  John, separated from Cynthia, fell in love
with Yoko and her ideas.  Some of her conceptual art had the same
intellectual playfulness as his lyrics, and Lennon became a
collaborator in many of her projects.  They made films--of flies
crawling, of dozens of bare bur made records, including the notorious
Two Virgins which they posed naked, front and back.  Shock!  Scandal!
Grim predictions for the future!

In fact, there was already a fair amount of dissension among the
members of the band:  McCartney wanted to get out more and play for
the folks, Lennon wanted to work in the recording studio, like an
artist with a canvas.  The ideological pressures and upheavals of the
decade made the four Beatles stand ut in even sharper contrast to
each other.  John became much more political, George more spiritual,
Paul seemingly more larky, and Ringo more social.  In the more than
two years between Sergeant Pepper and Abbey Road, Lennon and
McCartney wrote, separately and still (but more tenuously) together,
some of their greatest songs (Penny Lane, All you Need is Love, and
Strawberry Fields Forever).  But if the turmoil had an immediate
productive side, it also took an inevitable toll.  In 1969, after the
completion of Abbey Road, John told the boys he was leaving.

year, McCartney went his own way and that, one would thought, was
that.  End of Beatles, end of era.  But the Beatles would never go
away because their music endured; it became part of a common
heritage, a shared gift.  No matter how many times they were played
in elevators or gas stations, Beatles songs were too vibrant ever to
qualify as "standards."  That these were Beatles songs, not the
single expression of an individual, needs to be remembered amid all
the Lennon eulogies, which call him the strong creative force of the
group.

In the process of riding out all the massive changes of the '60s and
bringing about a few on their own, the Beatles also trashed an
elementary law of geometry:  this was one whole that was greater than
the sum of its parts.  Lennon was unfairly used as a means to put
McCartney in his place, although Lennon had taken pains lately to
redefine details of his collaboration with Paul, and to make sure
credit was distributed accurately.  The melodic range of the music
ran from marching band to rhythm and blues, from tonal stunt flying
to atonal acrobatics, once in a while all in the same song.  The
Beatles sang ballads that could almost be Elizabethan, rockers that
still sound as if they come from the distant future, and it was hard
to peg all that invention to any single source.  Lennon joked about
walking into a restaurant and being saluted by the band with a
rendition of Yesterday, a pure McCartney effort.  Many radio and
video memorials to Lennon included Let It Be, another Beatles tune
that was all McCartney.

If it was hard to keep the credits straight with all the Beatles, it
was harder still for them to keep their friendly equilibrium.
McCartney, married to Linda Eastman and staying close to the
hearthside, released a series of albums that were roundly drubbed as
corny, until he broke through splendidly in 1973 with Band on the
Run.  Lennon, married to Ono and living in New York, released a great
solo record, Plastic Ono Band, then threw himself headlong into
uncertainty.  He and Ono lived in a series of elaborate post-hippie
crash pads, became obsessed not only with artistic experimentation
but with radical political flamboyance.  Lennon's subsequent albums
remained achingly personal, but turned increasingly random,
unfocused.  They were indignant and assaultive, adrift.

When he and Ono separated for a time in the early '70s, Lennon went
on an 18-month bender of drink, drugs and general looniness.  "We
were all drinking too much and tearing up houses," recalls one of his
cronies at the time, Drummer Jim Keltner.  "No one drank like he did.
He had broken up with Ono and was with another woman at the time.
Suddenly, he just started screaming out Ono's name.  That separation
from her almost killed him."  Being treated as some sort of witchy
parasite was no treat for the estranged Mrs. Lennon either, and when
they both finally reconciled, they changed their lives in unexpected
ways.

Lennon released one more record--a collection of rock oldies--then
settled back with Ono in the Dakota to raise their son Sean, who was
born on Oct. 9, 1975, the day of his father's birthday.  Said Lennon:
"We're like twins."  Occasionally, John and Ono would go public,
often to fight the ultimately unsuccessful attempts of the Nixon
Justice Department to deport Lennon on an old marijuana conviction in
England.  Mostly, however, they stayed at home, rearing Sean,
redecorating the 25 room rooms in their four Dakota apartments (art
deco and artifacts of ancient Egypt, including a sarcophagus in the
living room; blue clouds painted on the ceiling of a downstairs
office), expanding their financial holdings (Lennon left an estate
estimated at $235 million), buying property and Holstein cows.

The Holsteins were selected because they were meant to yield
nourishment, not be slaughtered for it.  Ono took care of all the
details, and Lennon did not know about the sale of the cows until he
read an item in the paper.  He was more pleased than surprised.
"Only Yoko," he said admiringly "could sell a cow for $250,000."

Ono could do a lot more than that.  The banker's daughter set herself
to mastering the mysteries of commercial law and deal making just as,
earlier, she had wrestled with the exotic exigencies of John Cage.
She met the attorneys and the accountants; she supervised the buying
up of property in Palm Beach, Fla., Cold Spring Harbor, an exclusive
enclave on Long Island, and in upstate New York.  When the Lennons
decided to make another album earlier this year, it was Ono who
called Record Executive David Geffen and worked out the deal.

The Lennons may have been taking a step or two aside from art, living
quietly, but they were not hermits.  They were collecting themselves,
looking for a center, a core.  It seemed hard to understand, but
shouldn't have been.  Ono sat behind the desk and John stayed home
with the little boy.  Julian, Lennon's other, older son, was now a
teen-ager who lived in Britain with his mother, but wore leather
jackets and jeans, like his Dad back in the days of the Quarrymen,
and talked of becoming a rocker.  John did not see Julian often, and
said recently, "I don't remember seeing him as a child."  But Lennon
suggested that he had lately wanted to know Julian better, and one of
the most haunted faces in last week's gallery of grief was Julian's,
enduring the same pain that had afflicted his father at almost the
same age some 25 years before.  He, like John, had lost a parent
twice.

John gloried in playing parent to Sean, and like to call himself a
househusband.  What upset traditionalists was the fact that he
obviously reveled in his domestic role.  this role reversal was seen
by the man raised by an aunt and three of her sisters as no threat at
all.  He insisted--indeed, proved--that he was putting nothing at
risk, not his manhood and not his artistry.

Double Fantasy, the new record, demonstrated that.  One's
contributions are especially accessible and congenial after years of
punk and New Wave conditioning.  John's songs, simple, direct and
melodic, were celebrations of love and domesticity that asked for,
and required, no apology.  It was not a great record, like Plastic
Ono Band, but it might have been the start of another time of
greatness.

The subjects of Double Fantasy, released last month, were supposedly
not the stuff of rock, but John Lennon never bound himself to
tradition.  "My life revolves around Sean," he told some radio
interviewers from San Francisco on the afternoon of the day he was
killed.  "Now I have more reason to stay healthy and bright...And I
want to be with my best friend.  My best friend's me wife.  If I
couldn't have worked with her, I wouldn't have bothered...I consider
that my work won't be finished until I'm dead and buried, and I hope
that's a long, long time."  As he spoke those words, Mark David
Chapman waited for him out on the street.

Lennon's death was not like Elvis Presley's.  Presley seemed, a the
end, trapped, defeated and hopeless.  Lennon could have gone that way
too, could have destroyed himself.  But he did something harder.  He
lived.  And, for all the fame and finance, that seemed to be what he
took the most pride in.

"He beat the rock-'n'-roll life," Steve Van Zandt said the day after
Lennon died.  "Beat the drugs, beat the fame, beat the damage.  He
was the only guy who beat it all."  That was the victory Mark Chapman
took from John Lennon, who had an abundance of what everyone wants
and wanted only what so many others have, and take for granted.  A
home and family.  Some still center of love.  A life.  One minute
more.

By Jay Cocks