By: Earnest Leogrande
Niagara Falls Gazette
January 25, 1970
John Lennon has become the outstanding member of The Beatles because of his diversity of talent as well as outspokenness. With Paul McCartney, he has composed most of the Beatles' songs. He has shown a James Joyce-like adroitness with words and in writing two humorous books (one letter adapted to the stage). He has been featured as a movie actor, apart from his fellow Beatles, in the anti-war How I Won the War. He has filmed an experimental movie with his wife, Yoko Ono, plus an anti-capital punishment TV documentary. He has drawn a series of erotic lithographs, which will be published by Avant-Garde magazine.
Yoko has made a reputation of her own as an offbeat artist making a taboo, challenging movie consisting of a succession of 364 bare bottoms and encouraging people to crawl into bags, where shut off from the outside environment, they can confront themselves.
When these two divorced their mates and married, they reinforced each other's exploratory creativity. "We were both doing things, but when we came together, I think the forces became naturally stronger," Yoko told me in her quiet, almost shy voice. "It was like meeting a mirror and knowing where you're at. Both of us sort of serve as each other's mirror."
Their great peace campaign came naturally out of this union. "Both of us were peacenicks, you know," Yoko explained. "Alone, maybe we'd have been discouraged. We influenced each other. Peace was a very natural outcome of our work. If you remember, John wrote the song, 'All You Need Is Love'. And that was like a beautiful message. I was doing things in my own way, which was to stand in Trafalgar Square with a bag over me to protest."
The couple having forsaken the bed as a place for interviews, were sitting on a couch in the living room of friend country western singer Ronnie Hawkins and his wife. The Lennon had just come in from a romp in the snow. The house is in the country, an hour's drive from Toronto, and both looked as cheery and healthy as a couple of youngsters after recess period.
Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins go for plain cooking, but the smell of macrobiotic cooking permeated the house. The Lennons follow this diet, which is related to Zen Buddhism, and they had brought in Mr. and Mrs. Martin Schlass, proprietors of the macrobiotic Cauldron restaurant in New York's East Village, to cook for them.
John's beard looked a bit short because he had shaved it off and now regrowing it. "It's growing fine, thank you," he said.
Yoko assured me that she didn't object to John's beard. "That was just a reporter's story. We like to change our hairstyle, but because we are in a constant spotlight, the reporter played it up. We were wearing totally black yesterday, so that was an issue. We'd like some freedom too."
There had been a report that Lennon was considered for the title role of Jesus Christ in a rock opera to be presented at St Paul's Cathedral next spring. Christ is referred to as a "Superstar" in the musical production. "I never got the offer," he told me. "I'm always reading. I've been offered these parts to play, but no one ever offers them to me. Then when, the press asks, 'Did you offer this to him?' They'd say 'We wouldn't offer it to that idiot.'
Actually, the writers of the opera said they had decided it was better to give the role to an unknown. they may have been swayed by the recollection that Lennon was called a blasphemous egotist in 1966 when he said "The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. now." He later tried to explain by saying it was meant as a criticism of fans' distorted values.
I asked him if he agreed that the emphasis on material possessions prevented society from achieving peace after 1000s of years of war experience. "It hasn't helped," he said. "If you imagine material possessions as being a kind of drug, many people are hooked on it. That's why you get things like dropouts and hippies."
How could he square this attitude, I asked, with the material wealth that being John Lennon Superstar has brought him? His ready response indicated he contemplated the question before. "As a result of having all the material wealth I could have and still not finding any satisfaction or peace or happiness or whatever, that made me think, well, what else is there in life?
"Am I just going to sit here watching 20 TVs in 20 suites with 20 cars for the rest of my life? What shall I do after having achieved so-called success and fame that Western civilization says you should have? I'm finding out, it's nowhere. I'm them rather than giving them up."
The early Beatles told us in song that you can't buy love, but John Lennon is trying to find out if his fame and wealth can buy peace. Yoko concluded the interview with a benediction "We should all try together." She said, "Peace to you."
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