Who knows what Strom Thurmond had against the Beatles, but the senator
from South Carolina certainly knew how to make John Lennon’s life
miserable. On Feb. 4, 1972, the 69-year-old, anti–Civil Rights agitator
wrote a few lines to Attorney General John Mitchell and President
Richard Nixon’s aide, William Timmons, which would end up threatening
Lennon with deportation and entangling him in legal limbo for almost
four years.
“This appears to me to be an important matter, and I think it would be
well for it to be considered at the highest level,” Thurmond wrote. “As I
can see, many headaches might be avoided if appropriate action can be
taken in time.”
Thurmond attached a one-page Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
report explaining that Lennon appeared to be a threat to Republican
interests, particularly their desire to re-nominate Nixon at the San
Diego convention that coming summer. Citing a New York Times
article and an unidentified informant, the report explained that Lennon
was friendly with various left-leaning political activists, including
Yippie leader Jerry Rubin. The leftists had gathered in New York and
discussed the possibility of Lennon appearing at concerts on college
campuses to promote voter registration, marijuana legalization and bus
trips to the Republican convention for throngs of willing protesters.
In reality, while Lennon, then 31, spoke his mind about many political
issues, he always felt that, as a British citizen, he shouldn’t endorse
or attack individual U.S. candidates, says his friend, photographer Bob
Gruen. Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono strove never to be negative. “They
weren’t anti-war. They were pro-peace,” Gruen says. “They weren’t
against a politician, they were for voting.”
Gruen recalls that Lennon recounted listening to Rubin, Abbie Hoffman
and Tom Hayden hashing out radical plots while Allen Ginsberg sat in the
corner, cross-legged, ringing little Indian bells and chanting ommm . “John told me, ‘Ginsberg was the only one who made sense,’ ” Gruen says, laughing.
Thurmond’s note, however, had its desired effect. It climbed a few
links up the chain of command, and by the end of February, an
Immigration and Naturalization Service letter appeared under the door of
Lennon and Yoko’s apartment telling them they had until March 15 to
leave the country.
According to the INS, Lennon was an “excludable alien.” In 1968, a
police drug squad had conducted a warrantless search of his London flat
and found a half ounce of hashish. Lennon claimed he hadn’t known the
hash was there and, in fact, had swept the apartment three weeks earlier
on a tipoff that the squad would be coming. (Since Jimi Hendrix had
been a previous tenant he left nothing to chance.) He and Ono had even
gotten a friend in the police force to pre-search the place to make sure
they were clear. But the raiding officers discovered the stash in a
pair of binoculars, found in an untouched box of possessions that had
been moved from his previous residence. Lennon pleaded guilty and paid a
150-pound fine. The charge, he thought, was behind him.
Now it made him excludable under a provision against individuals
convicted of marijuana possession. He would go on to spend large amounts
of money, time and words in his battle to remain in New York, and on
Oct. 30, 1974, he and Gruen created an image that would make his case
succinctly.
Speaking of his adopted country as a guest on Tom Snyder’s talk show in
April 1975, Lennon said, “I love the place. I like to be here. I’ve got
a lot of friends here, and it’s where I want to be, Statue of
Liberty…welcome.”
***
Bob Gruen has lived at the Westbeth Artists Community, the
subsidized-housing complex in Manhattan’s West Village, since 1970.
Visiting him there requires a wormhole-like journey to the past that
takes you down surreally long hallways, up an elevator and down a flight
of stairs. His apartment is packed with so much reminiscence, it could
serve as a toddler’s alphabet teaching tool: Bugle, beads, Bowie, boas,
buttons, Blondie. Cartoon, Clash, couch, CDs.…
Concert posters mosaic the walls. Rows of filing cabinets are marked
with labels such as LED ZEPPELIN and PUNK SELECTIONS. To the left is a
kitchen disguised as a storage space and, near it, the door to the
bathroom, where Gruen used to develop prints. The place would seem large
if left empty, but nearly five decades of professional success strain
the seams with contact sheets of outtakes, negatives, color prints,
black and whites, contrast variations: all to secure a career’s worth of
perfect photographic moments, in this case, the one-sixtieth of a
second that John posed beneath the Statue of Liberty and flashed
the peace sign.
The son of a Hungarian immigrant mother who, ironically, was also an
immigration lawyer, Gruen, 71, has the worn, happy look of a man who has
enjoyed a lot of encores. His coronet of white-gray hair frames lucid
blue eyes. He has a comedian’s delivery and a core confidence, which is
probably why music gods such as Ike and Tina Turner, David Johansen, Joe
Strummer, Joey Ramone and Debbie Harry liked to hang out here. Lennon
used to kick back in the same place where the newer couch lives now.
As an official photographer to Lennon and Ono (who at the time of the
Liberty photo was estranged from her husband), he was allowed near total
access to the duo, in exchange for unique images that might be used
when record companies or media outlets called. He would take the
pictures for free and get paid when the image landed on a record cover
or in a promotional campaign.
Gruen first met Lennon and Ono backstage at the Apollo Theater in
December 1971, at a benefit concert for families of prisoners injured at
Attica. Gruen started taking snapshots in a scrum of four or five other
fans. While watching the cube flashes popping, Lennon said, “Everyone
is always taking pictures. Why do we never see these photos? What
happens to them?”
Gruen volunteered that he lived around the corner from Lennon’s Bank
Street apartment and would deliver his once they were developed.
“You live around the corner?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, slip them under my door.”
When Gruen dropped by with the prints, Jerry Rubin answered, which
shocked Gruen, since he had only seen the radical in the midst of riots.
He asked Rubin to pass the pictures to Lennon, rather than delivering
them personally. This lack of pushiness impressed Lennon and Ono, who
later asked him to be their photographer, sealing the deal by saying
they wanted to “know him.” Before long, a deep bond was forged between
the photographer and his subjects/employers.
Scrolling back to that day in 1974, Gruen recalls proposing the idea of
the Statue of Liberty portrait during a recording session for “Rock n’
Roll,” Lennon’s album of oldies covers. Gruen’s intention for this photo
was not commercial; he intended the shot to spark deeper support for
Lennon. “To me, the case was urgently important,” Gruen says.
Lennon liked the idea immediately. Returning from the studio on Oct.
29, Gruen dropped Lennon off at his apartment. Lennon told him, “See you
tomorrow. Bring your eyes.”
***
This was one of the last months of the infamous period known as
Lennon’s “lost weekend,” when Ono sent her husband packing with their
22-year-old assistant, May Pang, and encouraged them to become romantic.
Lennon had burned up L.A. on back-and-forth trips for six months,
over-imbibing and over-indulging with Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon and
their Hollywood pals, and had come back to New York with Pang in the
spring for a return to tranquility.
Pang recalls that Lennon was constantly worried about the deportation
battle. “He did not want to leave. He loved this country so much,” she
says. “The fact that they let in musicians who had done worse things
than him really hurt him. He thought, ‘I’m being singled out.’ And he
was.” He couldn’t risk immediate deportation by traveling overseas, so
he sacrificed visits to friends and family and resolved to stay and
fight.
When Gruen arrived at Lennon and Pang’s apartment on E. 52nd Street for
their Liberty excursion, Lennon was wearing his favorite black coat,
black scarf and black sweater. Gruen appreciated the formality and
seriousness of the fashion choice and, as an added benefit, the clothes
wouldn’t distract from the image’s simplicity.
John also wore a pin with the words LISTEN TO THIS BUTTON framing a
cropped picture Gruen had taken of Lennon’s eyes. The pin was the
detritus from a commercial campaign for Lennon’s most recent album
“Walls & Bridges,” which was meant to include a billboard in Los
Angeles that would “play” the whole album. Unfortunately, L.A. said no
to singing billboards.
Pang had grown up in Harlem and Spanish Harlem, but she had never been
to visit the statue. Now she and Lennon hoped to get a chance to go into
the crown.
They drove down through Manhattan in Gruen's car. New York was a hair’s
breadth from bankruptcy at the time, which happened to echo Gruen’s own
financial status. A bottle of Paisano wine went for $1 and a slice of
pizza for a quarter, and you could live on that most of the day. Lennon
roamed the city relatively undisturbed. He would call Gruen to meet him
at a bar and when, after a few hours, the place started filling with
fans summoned by other fans spreading the word by pay phone, they would
simply move to another club and buy hours of peace again.
As they got out of the car at Battery Park, Lennon pointed up to the
Financial District skyscrapers. “I bet I’m paying rent in all these
places,” he told Gruen.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I have so many lawyers…” Lennon joked. He was fighting with his
American manager Allen Klein at the time. He was more than three years
into his legal struggle to break up the Beatles. And overriding all this
was the time spent wrangling deportation, which had now exceeded two
years. “The funny thing about lawyers,” Lennon continued, “is we go to
meet them and they have a modest, regular office and we go back six
months later for another meeting and they have a big impressive office
and my picture’s on the wall.”
The reality was that Lennon’s sizeable personal wealth was stuck an
ocean away while he waited for his U.S. residency, and his business
income sat in receivership, awaiting resolution of his battle with Klein
and the dissolution of the Beatles. Gruen recalls walking a late-night
street with Lennon when a fan spotted him and did a triple take.
“You know, you look just like John Lennon?” the man said.
“I wish I had his money,” Lennon quipped, his standard deflection,
which at that particular moment, had the virtue of being absolutely
true.
***
This wasn’t Lennon’s first brush with Liberty. He had included a
Liberty postcard in the 1972 album art for Lennon’s and the Plastic Ono
Band’s “Some Time in New York City,” with a raised power fist replacing
the hand holding the torch. Six years earlier, Paul McCartney and Lennon
had circled Liberty Island for their first Apple Records board meeting.
As Gruen bought their ferry tickets, a returning boat pulled in, which,
oddly enough, happened to be packed with teenage girls. When they
spotted Lennon, they immediately began shrieking. Lennon hushed them,
promising, “If you stop yelling, I will sign for everybody.” He dashed
off the signatures fast enough that the trio was able to catch that next
boat.
Arriving on the island, they encountered an off-duty park ranger named
Angel who joined them on their mission to snap the image that scores of
tourists had taken countless times before — though in this case it was a
world-famous British tourist who needed to be back in the studio by 4
p.m.
Nowadays, no one would take a celebrity to a photo-shoot site without
visiting days ahead with a stand-in, for the lighting, the correct
angle. On that October day, armed with two Nikon F cameras, one loaded
with black-and-white and the other with Ektachrome daylight film, Gruen
was surprised by the challenge of trying to include both the 5-foot-11
Lennon and 305-foot Liberty in the same frame. “You can only back up so
far because it’s an island,” he points out, and he didn’t want the
distortion of a wide angle. Given the cloud cover, Gruen used a flash,
and since film costs money and developing costs time, he took only 28
black-and-white frames and two rolls — about 70 images — in color.
In one pose, John Lennon held up a Bic lighter, imitating the Statue.
Hand on hip, hand down. Gruen liked when Lennon flashed the peace sign,
because to him it looked like Lennon promising the government he would
be good.As Gruen took pictures, Pang noticed security guards with
earpieces starting to watch them. “I think we better go,” she warned.
They regretfully hurried off the island, having failed to experience
that thrill of going to the crown. “To see New York at its finest, for
what this Liberty stood for…,” she says of those days in the’70s. “If
you could stand up there and look out and say, ‘So this is my city.’
Nothing could beat that. What a magnificent view that would be. The
closest we ever got was to be on that island.”
Later, in the darkroom, Gruen considered removing a KEEP OFF GRASS sign
that wound up in the lower-right side of the frame. Gruen usually tried
to avoid excess words in his images, but the sign’s accidental
admonition proved to be too perfect. After all, it was ostensibly the
disputed six-year-old cannabis-possession charge that the government was
using to try to boot Lennon out of the country.
***
Chillingly, years later, Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman,
remembered the Statue of Liberty photo as being on the cover of a
paperback about Lennon he'd found at a library in Hawaii, the book that
sparked his psychotic rage. When Chapman first visited New York to plot
his crime, he thought he might jump from the crown to end his life,
since no one had ever attempted such a spectacular suicide, and the
notoriety, which he so desperately sought, would be about equal, he
thought, to that gained by murdering Lennon.
Thirty-six years after that fateful night, Chapman’s vicious act still
leaves Gruen in tears. “It’s the stupidest thing that ever could be,” he
says of the uselessness of his friend being killed.
That December of 1980, Gruen had been photographing John and Yoko’s
recording sessions for “Milk and Honey,” their companion album to
“Double Fantasy.” Usually, Gruen drove them home since they preferred
the normalcy to the limousine. That unforgettable Monday, Gruen was
printing the photos from their session two days before.
When he had spoken with John in the studio, his friend was elated.
The new album was near completion. Then they would start making videos,
rehearse and, by April, would embark on a world tour, with Gruen along
for the adventure. They would eat at their favorite Tokyo restaurants.
They would meet world leaders. Gruen hurried through the developing so
he could get to John and Ono in the studio by 1 a.m., when they
usually departed. But the recording machinery at the studio glitched
that night, and Lennon and Ono had no choice but to conclude early.
Gruen recalls his doorman buzzing him around 11 p.m., telling him to turn on the radio. “Lennon’s been shot,” the doorman said.
Gruen first assumed his friend had fallen victim to the crack epidemic
then ruling the city. Lennon never carried money, so maybe he had gotten
mugged and the addict had shot him in the leg, or arm. “Shot isn’t
dead,” Gruen recalls thinking, clinging to that slim hope.
Then, a former colleague phoned. He reported that he had seen blood everywhere on the TV. “Lennon’s dead,” he confirmed.
“I kind of sank to the ground,” Gruen says. As he lay on the floor, all
the plans he and his friend had delighted in, ended in an instant. He
started obsessing over hypothetical events that would haunt him for
years: If he had gotten to the studio earlier, he would have convinced
Yoko and John to go out to eat, like they always did, maybe at the
Russian Tea Room. Waiting for Lennon to return home, the assassin would
ultimately have succumbed to the December cold and given up. Or Gruen
would have driven his injured friend to the hospital faster than medical
care could reach him.
The phone rang as Gruen lay motionless. It kept ringing, then stopped,
and would ring again. He lay there. And then another call. It occurred
to him what the ringing meant: The whole world was watching. He was the
photographer. It was his job to make John look good. He crawled to his
filing cabinets, in the very space where he works today, and began
pulling pictures.
Pang recalls hearing the news on the radio at a friend’s and rushing
back to her home. First, Ringo’s executive secretary called for the
hospital number. Then Pang telephoned David Bowie. The singer, who had
been a good friend to Pang and John, was out on a date, but his
assistant told Pang to come to his apartment immediately. She remembered
being there when Bowie careered out of the elevator, unhinged by grief,
crying and screaming in disbelief. They huddled by the television
through the night, trying to make sense: “Who was this person?”
Returning home, she found the city in mourning. “It was the first time I
ever heard New York be so quiet. On every level,” Pang remembers. “On
the bus. No one was talking. And you saw the headlines.”
Gruen says that Ono later talked about the importance of the flag
carrier in a crusade. When the one holding the flag gets shot, somebody
has to pick up the flag and keep going. “He was holding a pretty big
flag,” Gruen says, “but fortunately a lot of people have come behind him
and we keep going. Yoko’s doing the lion’s share.”
Liberty carried the torch across the Atlantic, to shine on what was
then the world’s only healthy democracy. Like Frédéric Auguste
Bartholdi, who created the Statue of Liberty from his own inspiration
and industry, Gruen invented those images of Lennon and the Statue of
Liberty and holds the copyright. Like Bartholdi, Gruen has to some
extent lost control of those rights. Bartholdi gave up his battle
against the advertisers, postcard makers, and figurine forgers who stole
the image immediately. Gruen says he tries to track its usage, yet he
can’t help but be thrilled that people like it. He visited the Statue a
few years ago and watched the multitudes of visitors striking the John
pose. “It’s the price of making something world-famous,” Gruen says.
“It’s now part of the world.”
When the 29-year-old photographer took the photo in 1974, the image was
meant to reflect the deportation struggle, but since Lennon’s death, it
has taken on new meaning. “Now it’s a picture of two symbols of
freedom. To me, Lennon represents personal freedom,” he says. Gruen
considers it his unique accomplishment that he got those icons of
personal freedom in the same place. For one-sixtieth of a second.
Pang remembers Lennon’s reaction when he realized that Thurmond and the
government had been campaigning against him and had caused his years of
suffering. “I remember John saying, ‘Can you believe they are afraid of
me?’ That amazed him.”
Two days before John’s 35th birthday in 1975, federal Judge
Irving Kaufman rejected the government’s deportation appeal. The judge
threw out the case because deportation was not meant to be a punitive
act; “moral culpability” mattered in the marijuana-possession charge,
and John did not appear to know he had marijuana on the premises. But
Kaufman added remarks about the deeper meaning of the deportation
attempt: “If in our 200 years of independence, we have in some measure
realized our ideals, it is in large part because we have always found a
place for those committed to the spirit of liberty and willing to help
implement it,” Kaufman wrote in his decision. “Lennon’s four-year battle
to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in this American
dream.”
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