The Last Days of John Lennon

by James Patterson

“John needed Paul’s attention to detail and persistence,” says Cynthia. “Paul needed John’s anarchic, lateral thinking.”

swoons, “George has got sexy eyelashes. He’s got sexy eyelashes!” John breaks down the band’s appeal. “We reckoned we could make it because there were four of us. None of us would’ve made it alone, because Paul wasn’t quite strong enough, I didn’t have enough girl-appeal, George was too quiet, and Ringo was the drummer.

In 1965, Ringo leased flat 1 at 34 Montagu Square, around a mile from Abbey Road, and kept it as a city pied-à-terre even after he moved to Weybridge, Surrey. He’d rented the apartment first to Paul, then to twenty-five-year-old Jimi Hendrix, who wrote “The Wind Cries Mary,” a May 1967 British single that also appeared on his debut US album Are You Experienced, while living there. Ringo evicted Hendrix after the celebrity tenant damaged the apartment’s walls during an acid trip.

On December 29, 1974, while they’re at the Polynesian Village Resort at Disney World, the lawyers catch up to John. With the revised documents in front of him, he hesitates, aware of what he’s about to do. “Take out your camera,” John suggests to May. And then he hesitates again, looking out the window. “I could almost see him replaying the entire Beatles experience in his mind,” she says. “Even though they all felt they had to break up to get to the next level of their musical careers, John had started this band that changed the world. It changed pop culture. It changed how we live and how we dress. And he knew that. So when he sat down to sign, he knew that this was it. His was the last signature. As he had started the group, he was the one to end it.” And so it comes to an end in the Magic Kingdom: with a final autograph placed just under the other three, John Lennon signs away the Beatles.

When John takes Sean to the Bermuda Botanical Gardens, a sanctuary for local foliage that dates from the turn of the twentieth century, they walk through cedar and palmetto trees to enter a flowering garden. He bends down to inspect a bed of sweet-smelling trumpet-shaped blossoms. FREESIA DOUBLE FANTASY, he reads from the identifying plaque. Double Fantasy—that’s a great title, he thinks to himself. He and Yoko talk it over and share the excitement over the phrase, with its layered meanings. Not only is it a flower, John points out, but also, “without really saying anything, it says everything.” Yoko likes that it references “a dream that we have—which we share.” John is almost ready to go home.