John Lennon watched his Deportment (1973)

 John Lennon Watches His Deportment 

By Ivor Davis

Cleveland Press

December 21, 1973

    John Lennon, the bizarrest of The Beatles, burrowed into a pillow-strewn couch in his borrowed Hollywood mansion. A comfortable, exotic prisoner. A rebel, still with a cause, trapped inside America.

     The bar to his freedom is a legal battle with the US immigration authorities. They want to deport him as an undesirable because he was convicted in Britain in 1968 on a marijuana charge. Lennon, fearing for his visa, remains determinedly a sitting tenant. 

    He says, "I'm not setting foot outside America until all this is resolved." Lennon, the man who has taken some savage slashes at the worlds of justices and spent days in bed with wife Yoko Ono in the cause of world peace, thinks he is winning what is a long battle.

     These days, his tactics are less flamboyant. He's been mending fences, winning friends and influencing people, so that people like former New York Mayor John Lindsay, TV comic and talk show host Dick Cavett, and the powerful and staid Wall Street Journal have all been teaming up to fight for the John and Yoko cause.

     Surrounded in his medieval palace in the Hollywood suburb of Bel Air by expensive antiques, his hair spiky and shorn, in his embroidered jeans and tinted sunglasses, Lennon said, "This deportation fight has been going on so long now that I've got used to it. They stopped tapping my phone and following me around when I went on TV and announced they were doing that. I'm still appealing, and my lawyers call me when they need me. Otherwise, I just carry on normally."

     Normally, in the past has meant irreverent and unorthodox methods, but now the Lennons have been playing by establishment rules, showing up at fashionable Washington cocktail parties to lobby for support.

     "It was a matter of showing them we are not dope freaks," he explained, "and that we are not ogres or martyrs with bombs, but just a couple with a leaning towards socialism."

     And it's had its effect. The last time Lennon and his wife came to California was to sign up for a course in Primal Therapy, which John says triggered his intense period of self-examination, and which helped him to handle himself, his life, and his problems. "I have the ability to cry if I'm upset or feel something deeply. It was valuable to me and useful to get it out of my system instead of bottling it up the way I used to.

     "I'm not saying I'm not neurotic anymore, but I can handle it better, and I don't need to get ulcers and a heart attack. If I'm at a sad movie, I'll cry. Women cry, but men are not supposed to show their emotions."

     The controversial treatment and therapy also helped Lennon come to the conclusion that the Beatle dream was over, that the bubble had burst.

     "But I'm a survivor," he says. "My instinct is to survive, and I came through everything: Beatlemania, the Maharishi, therapy, American Integration. It's all water off a duck's back. And I put it down to experience."

     He now has no permanent home in England. "There's always a bed for me at Ringo's place", he said.

     And of the whole Beatle mad house?  His focus today is less, better, much sweeter. "It's all rosy memories," he says. "After each tour, I would take six months off and say, 'That's it, no more'. But you start remembering the good bits, the good times, I wouldn't have missed it, that's for sure, even knowing exactly what it was all about."

     Three of the Beatles did, in fact, team up again in California earlier this year, when Ringo made an album that touched off a flood of Beatles reunion rumors. Although Paul McCartney was not around.

     Lennon has problems with his visa, McCartney, although married to an American, has problems getting into the US, and added his bit to Ringo's disk in England.

     "We still like to say Apple is high and rising", says Lennon, grinning, although his clashes with his songwriting partner, McCartney, led to a much-publicized inevitable breakup. "Oh, I speak to Paul on the phone," says John, "and someone told me Paul and me were only a decimal point from settling everything. But I wish he would just send me a letter now and then. With all the legal stuff, we  will be tied together for a long time to come."

     At 33, Lennon, diplomatically, had just a question about a full-scale Beatles reunion. "It's a moot point. I really cannot give a definite answer either way."