The Lost Weekend
My Day in the Life of John Lennon
In the summer of 1973, John Lennon fell into an abyss of self-destructive behavior marked by excessive drinking and womanizing. Contrary to popular belief at the time, it had nothing to do with the Beatles’ breakup three years earlier. By all historical accounts, his troubles were tied to a relentless effort by the United States government to deport him, ostensibly because of a 1968 arrest in Denmark for hashish possession. But it was more personal than that. President Nixon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, enraged by Lennon’s anti-Vietnam War activism, orchestrated a campaign to terrorize Lennon, his acquaintances, and his friends by having them tailed wherever they went and tapping their phones. The surveillance was obvious, deliberately so; the G-men brazenly let themselves be seen and the telltale clicks of wiretaps were a dead giveaway. Lennon sank under the weight of this sustained psychological assault. When he hit bottom, so did his marriage to Yoko Ono.
It’s said that Yoko, a loving but artful agent provocateur, cannily saved their relationship by counterintuitively pushing John away — a matter of prudent self-sacrifice. She insisted he leave New York for LA and take May Pang, their amenable and already romantically implicated amanuensis, with him. That 1973 summer stretched into a year and a half of debauchery, bizarre…
