THE unemployed security guard from Hawaii who is accused of killing John Lennon had saved up to go to New York and shoot him, a court was told last night. Mark David Chapman╒s lawyer said he had shot the former Beatle because: ╥I understood his words but I didn╒t understand his meaning.╙
The shooting stunned people of all generations on both sides of the Atlantic. John Lennon╒s wife, Yoko Ono, who was with him when five bullets were pumped into his body, issued a statement, signed by her and their son, Sean, aged five. There would be no funeral for the 40-year-old singer, she said. ╥Later in the week we will set the time for silent vigil to pray for his soul. We invite you to participate wherever you are at the time.╙
Chapman, aged 25, was appointed a lawyer by the court, and at the lawyer╒s request he was transferred to hospital for a psychiatric examination after being arraigned on a charge of second degree murder. Security at the courthouse was intense. ╥We don╒t want another Jack Ruby,╙ one policeman said, referring to the man who shot President Kennedy╒s assassin.
Judge Martin Rettinger ordered that Chapman be placed under a ╥suicide watch╙ and kept away from other patients. Mr Herbert Adlerberg, his lawyer, said that Chapman had twice tried to kill himself. Chapman╒s wife in Honolulu refused to talk to anyone. The director of community relations at the hospital where he had worked for several years described him as a quiet, conscientious good worker and well liked.
Sources said that for days he hung around the Dakota, the plush apartment building on 72nd Street and Central Park West where John Lennon lived with his wife Yoko Ono and their son Sean. On Monday afternoon, when Lennon left his home, Chapman approached him asking for his autograph, and Lennon reportedly signed a record album for him. That evening, at 10.30, when the Lennons returned from a recording session, Chapman was waiting outside the Dakota. As Lennon walked into the building Chapman called ╥Hey, John╙ and is then said to have emptied his revolver into the singer╒s body.
The news spread swiftly, stunning New York and the nation. All night hundreds of mourners gathered in front of the Dakota, lighting candles, weeping and chanting Beatles songs. Yesterday the tragedy was treated as the most important news story in America and the media likened the assassination to that of John Kennedy.
THE CRUEL AND UNCOMPROMISING WORKING CLASS HERO
By Stanley Reynolds
John Lennon was the hardest, toughest kid I ever met. He had an uncompromising attitude which would never give an inch. He was completely unbending and it shocked you meeting him because he was, after all, a young fellow and a civilian ╤ so why was he at war? The truth was he was at war with the whole world. Why that was no one will ever know. He was brought up by his auntie in Liverpool; he was a boy who never knew his father or his mother. But other children have had that happen to them and they were not like John Lennon. He was hard and cruel and uncompromising and this was reflected in his life-style and in his songs he wrote. It is very ironic to think today that it was John Lennon who wrote a song called Happiness is a Warm Gun.
He had a most aggressive manner and straight-from-the-shoulder style and he made a virtue out of ignorance which was really unforgiveable. An entire generation of Liverpool youth imitated John Lennon wishing not only to look and talk like him but also to think like him and the result has been a twisted, embittered generation. When the news of his death was broadcast early yesterday morning, one of the first people to call me from Liverpool was Bob Wooler, the man who was the disc jockey at the old Cavern Club in Matthew Street, Liverpool, between 1961 and ╒66 where the Beatles first started.
Talking about Lennon╒s extraordinary character, Wooler said a very good thing; he said Lennon was ╥the Ernest Hemingway of rock music.╙ It is a very telling description. He was, like Hemingway, big and rough and tough in his everyday manner and, like Hemingway, he was terse in his songwriting style. His lyrics were cut down, spare, without any padding. He wrote songs which were the vox pop of Liverpool. Look, for example, at the way he uses the common and much used word ╥girl╙ in his song Thank You Girl.
In the early years when the Beatles first started he would leave grown-up people in the music business open mouthed in amazement over the way he could be so unbending. ╥He always had this take it or leave it attitude,╙ Bob Wooler said. ╥I used to work with the Beatles trying to get them bookings because they had no manager and I remember, on a number of occasions, when the money was not very good or something else was bothering him, Lennon saying, ╘Oh, well, if they╒re going to act like that tell them to fuck it╒.╙
When I first met Lennon at the Cavern Club in the early Sixties I was right away struck by his intelligence. The second or third time I met him I realised that he was extremely intelligent, that, in fact, I was standing there in my three piece suit with collar and tie talking to a black leather clad lad who was that mysterious thing, a genius. He demonstrated his genius in his songs but there was also the touch of the genius in his unforgiving manner and in his humour. ╥What do you call that hair?╙ a crew-cut American reporter asked Lennon. ╥Arthur,╙ Lennon said. If John Lennon was hard and uncompromising there was also another side to him. Underneath it all he had an amazing streak of friendliness. Like a lot of his friends and acquaintances I regularly received picture postcards from John with these extra bits of drawing put on them.
Lennon was the archetypal Liverpudlian and it is the city, more than rock music or anything else, which will be mourning John today and in the years to come. He was a genuine working class artist, a genius sprung up, without rhyme or reason, out of nowhere from England╒s most genuine working class city.
