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Volume 3179b

The Passing Of John Lennon:
Part III
by R.E. Prindle

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 Doppleganger #1
     When John Lennon met Yoko Ono he knew very little of art and nothing of the New York art scene.  His high school years had been spent in open and futile rebellion; the next few years had been spent only in the German underworld with no time for cultivation.

From there he went into the whirl of the Beatles years so one might say he had been in cultural suspended animation for all his adult life.

Doppelganger #2
     Yoko Ono since 1960 had been engaged in the New York avant garde art scene.  She was au courant when she left for London in 1966.  Hooking up with Lennon she began to educate him according to her understanding of art.  By the time the Ono-Lennons arrived in New York in the late sixties that scene was dominated by the POP art of Andy Warhol while the world both she and Lennon knew in 1960 was unrecognizable.  Yoko wasted  no time in ingratiating herself with Andy but not the factory.  After he was shot in 1969 the old Factory disappeared and after his recovery Warhol began a new life.  It is possible that she tried to establish contact with him between ‘64 and ‘66.  She did know warhol’s associate, Sam Green, from her first days in the Village in 1960.

     By the time of her return to NYC Yoko had achieved world wide fame by using Lennon and his fame  in their charades for ‘Peace.’  Now she had the perfect entree to enter Warhol’s circle.  Warhol was a sucker for celebrities, he did Lennon’s portrait, so he was flattered when Yoko asked him to introduce she and John into society.  If Warhol could pester, Yoko was unstoppable.  While Andy wasn’t exactly persona gratis at that time he was thick with Sam Adams Green who did have entree to society.  Between the the two of them they set up a party to introduce the Ono-Lennons.

John was, of course, no Mick Jagger.  While Mick adapted himself quickly to the demands of his fame and moved easily in society, John was awkward being out of the element of his self-styled working class hero.  Yoko, too, was no mixer so at the party Yoko and John sat silently in a corner as though in one of Yoko’s bags watching the party goers.

Warhol Jagger

     It might be apropos to point out that Jagger and Warhol were fairly close.  Jagger was one of the few people attending Warhol’s funeral in Pittsburgh while Bianca was in Warhol’s entourage in the eighties.  Warhol also painted a portfolio of Jagger pictures that today command healthy prices.

Witchy Woman and Warhol

The Devil In Disguise
  Yoko still persisted with Warhol but Andy having been disappointed once was not up for it twice.  He distanced himself from the pair describing them to Sam Green as boring.  An ultimate putdown.

     Initially the Lennons  lived in the Bohemian scene downtown.  Mickey Ruskin, the owner of Max’s Kansas City, described the Bohemian scene thusly:  the well-to-do Bohos, the middle and the lower class.  Those associated with the Kettle of Fish and its environs of which Dylan was a member were of the lower class while the Kettle of Fish itself was owned by the Mafia.  He believed Max’s was in the middle.  As I haven’t learned the Ono-Lennon’s downtown address I assume they were more of the haut ton Bohos.

     At any rate they soon left those environs to migrate to the Upper West Side where they secured apartments in the famous, or soon to be famous, Dakota.  It was then that their NYC life took its definitive form.

     I have been to NYC a few times so that I know the general layout and have some feel for the place but I have by no means an intimate knowledge so essentially I’m working from maps.  I know where MOMA and some few prominent art landmarks are from experience but not that many.

     At any rate the Dakota is a famous landmark. Acceptance as a tenant is by committee approval.  John and Yoko were strenuously vetted but finally admitted.  They took over actor Robert Ryan’s apartment #72.  If you have seen the movie Rosemary’s Baby the camera pans past apartments 71 and 72.  No filming was allowed inside the Dakota so while the exterior shots are authentic the interiors were shot on sets.  Thus the apartment of the Satanists is a fictional 7E.  The apartment next to it  in which the young couple resided may have been number 72.  The man of the couple who was an actor sold his wife’s body to Satan as the carrier of his child for success in the theatre which he was granted.  Thus the Ono-Lennons moved into an apartment closely associated with devil worship, the occult and witchcraft..  This will become more important as Yoko associated herself with all three.  In fact, Yoko through John Green would have been familiar with the Yoruban Santeria religion that she in all likelihood would have reverenced.  The Spirit Foundation that she established is concerned with the preservation of just such tribal institutions.

The Dakota

  These are magnificent apartments that I presume Rosemary's Baby duplicates.   Huge fifty foot long living rooms as part of a ten room apartment.  The Ono-Lennons would soon own both 71 and 72 lacking only the fictional 7E  while having a Studio apartment as well.

     Being now permanently settled, Yoko having access to John’s superb income began to spend it.  Of course, she virtually cleaned out department stores on her buying binges, any girl’s dream.  But, she also began to buy heavily into art and antiques as investments.  This brought Warhol’s friend Sam Adams Green into a close association with her.  Rich society women were Sam’s forte.  He has an interesting story.  He was actually descended from the second president of the United States, Samuel Adams.  He arrived in New york in 1960 about the same time Andy Warhol was trying to establish himself as a fine artist and Yoko the same.  Warhol of course began as a commercial artist doing shoe ads but in 1960 he changed the emphasis of his career.

     In the fine arts field one of the first gallery people Andy met was Sam Green of the Green Gallery.  Different Green, Sam only worked there and shared the name.  He and Andy hit it off.  By 1965 Green was associated with the art department of UPennsylvania where he staged a Warhol exhibition in the same  year.  From there he gravitated back to NYC where he began a career as art consultant to rich women on both continents.  They liked him.  Through the socialite Cecile Rothschild he was introduced to Greta Garbo with whom he was sort of a trusted companion for 15 years.

     He was very knowledgeable about art as an investment, traveling between Euorpe and the US advising socialites on the most investment-worthy art.  He apparently derived a more than comfortable income from his efforts.  He was a trusted advisor of Yoko.  Some say that he and Yoko’s Tarot reader, John Green, who would enter John and Yoko’s life at about this time, combined to bilk Yoko for overpriced objects.  This presumes that both men were dishonest and that Yoko was a fool.  As Yoko’s investments have prospered I think we can dismiss the latter, although Yoko did take pride in being able to spend vast sums.  She would have taken pleasure in overpaying.

    Rather I would say that Sam Green was a very knowledgeable expert wose task was to find art that would appreciate in value.  Thus the question is did he perform that function and the answer is, yes.  Yoko’s acquistions increased in value far above her purchase prices.  I think it is unfair then to say that the Greens bilked her.  Surely the laborer is worth his hire.
 

Sam Green - Current

Warhol Portrait

  Now, Sam Green as her agent had to buy the items he acquired for her.  Being knowledgeable as to who in society wanted to sell what at distressed prices he may have made some excellent buys that he then tacked on his margin which of course meant that he sold to Yoko for ‘more than they were worth.’  But, heck, even Christie’s and Sotheby’s take twenty per cent each from the buyer and seller.  That’s a forty per cent surcharge.  However Sam served his function of providing investment pieces, so I see no evidence of bilking.

     Sam Green also formed a close, probably romantic, liaison with Yoko that persisted until after John’s death.  Another art dealser she became close to was a Sam Havadtoy with whom she subsequently lived for twenty years beginning immediately the day after John’s death.

     Now the men Yoko associated herself with were all effetes, that were either emasculated when she found them or who she emasculated.  Strangely Lennon was the strongest of the lot.  Both her first Japanese husband and Tony Cox appear to have been heterosexuals but both Sam Green and Sam Havadtoy were dependent homosexuals.  With Havadtoy Yoko may have had her ideal relationship.  He was thoroughly emasculated, while with the fortune Yoko  inherited from Lennon he was totally dependent on her.  The classic toy boy a couple decades younger than herself.  He, by the way, after his twenty year stint as live-in retired to Hungary with an abundant palimony, but he isn’t talking.

     In my reading of the situation then, a not particularly compliant John became somewhat of a liability to her, especially as he began to reassert himself with the return to the recording studio in 1980.  The problem has the surface appearance of separating the man form his money and discarding the man.

     Yoko began building her entourage, Sam Green, John Green, Sam Havadtoy and her various occult people with what appears to be an admiration for and some sort of connection with Andy Warhol.  Sam Green and Havadtoy would be a troublesome presence in Lennon’s life during the recording of Double Fantasy, while he does not appear to have been enchanted with the Warhol connection.

     As has been mentioned Yoko became involved in occult practices.  She did practice hypnotism on Lennon and was an adept at suggestion which is the essence of hypnotism.  Thus on the one hand she suggested forcefully to May Pang that she take up with Lennon while it is probable she hypnotized Lennon into taking up with May Pang.  Post hypnotic suggestion would give her a command over all Lennon’s actions.  Once implanted she would only have to say the word and Lennon would follow her suggestions.

     How complicit John Green would have been in this isn’t exactly clear but any of Yoko’s suggestions to John could have been complemented by a reading.  John Green was after all dependent on Yoko for a very generous income beyond whatever he may have scammed.

     John Green is another interesting case.  He was apparently successful as a Tarot reader before he met Yoko while he is reported to hae been a student of the African Yoruba religion called Santeria.  The Yoruba are a tribe in Nigeria, middle river, Western side.  He would have obtained much of the magic information he displayed in Cartagena, Columbia, SA from that source.  The sixties themselves  were the great period of the dissolution of the American mind and personality.  One of the key items in the disintegration was the 1962 movie, Mondo Cane. (It’s A Dog’s World).  It is difficult to assess the impact of this movie on the malleable college age mind of the times.

      I saw the movie then and while it passed out of my conscious mind it struck me most forcibly and lodged in my subconscious mind.  I, of course, reviewed the movie for this essay and while I at first remembered little gradually my conscious mind recovered the images so that I remember almost all.  The viewing at the time was very repulsive and unsettling to my mind as it was for everyone I talked to about it and every college kid saw it.  Still, consciously I missed the true import of the movie completely.

     The filmmakers equated some New Guinea stone age people with modern Whites and equated them -- said both states of consciousness were the same --  and that there had been no advance between the primitive and modern.  Then they showed Whites at their goofiest and most ridiculous.  Drunks at a German Oktoberfest, aged tourists clumsily trying to do a hula.  The movie was a real exercise in moral relativity.  It was shortly after viewing the movie that I first remember hearing the phrase ‘Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.’  I don’t want to philosophize on this but my thought was that  if I think something is bad therefore it must be because I think it and I can’t be wrong.

     The movie had a devastating effect on the attitude of the generation.  It was a form of hypnosis with a great deal of post-hypnotic suggestion.  Whether John Green saw the movie or not I can’t say but if he had it would have prepared him for accepting Yoruban Santeria.   In fact these primitive forms of religion and what not flourished in the wake of Mondo Cane.  At the same, as I indicated, Yoko would have been very open to Santeria.  I think there is little doubt that Green and she at least discussed the religion and its African tribal origin.  Especially as she established something she calls the Spirit Foundation.  In the online prospectus she describes the foundation thusly:

The Spirit Foundation is…concerned with the protection and promotion of creative and cultural diversity amongst shamanic tribal communities worldwide.  Part of the foundations work is the International Shamanic Network which aims at promoting the ancient creative archetypes of man and their binding ecological realtionship to the world.

     Our emphasis is on education for action.

          As mentioned, Yoko and Lennon moved into the suites used in Rosemary's Baby with its Satanic overtones.  In the movie a young woman living with the Satanic couple either jumps or is pushed to her death not far from where Lennon was shot.  In this very location Yoko took up Satanism.  She decided she wanted to make a pact with the Devil to obtain her wishes.  The ubiquitous Sam Green knew of a witch who could serve as an intermediary between Yoko and Satan.  (Remember I am only retailing the story, I don’t believe Satan exists.)

     Sam Green who had prospered as an art consultant had used some of his earnings to purchase what he called a castle in Cartagena, Colombia.  He recommended his witch to Yoko who asked John Green to take her to the witch as he doubled as Tarot reader and Wizard.  John Green did so and the witch duly negotiated a deal between Yoko and the Lord of Fire.  When it came time to sign the pact Yoko asked Green to do it for her which he did.  She was aghast when he told her he didn’t sign his name but hers.  Yoko trying to cheat the devil.

      We don’t know what she asked Satan for but we are compelled to believe she got it.

Santeria Illustration
     As I believe she hypnotized Lennon into taking the Long Weekend I don’t know exactly why she wanted him out of the house.  She certainly closely monitored his activities while he was away both in NYC and LA.  During his absence  Yoko didn’t have a Power of Attorney so she was somewhat constrained as John had her on a 300K budget.  When he returned she quickly obtained his POA so that she had unlimited use of his money and, in fact, his identity.

     Lennon is criticized for being a recluse in the years between 1975-80.  He certainly wasn’t a recluse in that he withdrew from the world.  He merely limited his contacts with it.  It is said there was a fifteen month period when he was completely withdrawn.  While he was obviously suffering from a mental malise in my opinion the withdrawal was completely justified.  He had mental issues that had to be resolved.  He had the money and time to work at it as he did.

     He had a mother/father fixation he had to resolve.  He had the feeling that he had been either a genius or a lunatic from boyhood.  In a remarkable rant within the 1970 Rolling Stone interview he rants for pages because no one recognized him as a genius in his youth, while he had now convinced himself that he was and had been a genius.  The fact that he never did his schoolwork doesn’t  seem to him that that may have a reason why people missed his genius and thought him somewhat mad.  What would they have done if they had?  So he had to reconcile the issue in his mind.

     He seems to have made no advance past his school years except in music.  The years between leaving school and taking up with Yoko were completely wasted intellectually while the pressures of phenomenal success and wealth disoriented him completely, not to mention the massive doses of drugs.  At some time then he had to come down and organize his mind and life.    From 1968 to let us say 1980 he was completely dependent on Yoko for his mental balance.  In NYC he went where she did and did what she did.  Hence the connection to Andy Warhol and Sam Green.

     There are numerous pictures of Yoko, Lennon and Warhol.  Yoko even patterned some of her work after Warhol’s style as in the ‘work’ below patterned after Warhol’s double Elvis.  Thus she associates herself and Lennon with Presley.

Yoko Goes Warhol, Imitation of Double Elvis

     As I mentioned before the social entree arranged by Warhol and Sam Green failed because of the social ineptness of the Ono-Lennons.

     While we have a full record of what Lennon was doing during his ‘Lost Weekend’ we have a less full account of what Yoko was doing.  She seems to have had romantic liaisons with at least three men -- Sam Green, Sam Havadtoy and the guitarist David Spinozza.

     Perhaps she wanted to see how well she could do on her own as a musician, to see if her reputation as a performance artist and, in her mind, musician, was sufficient to maintain a career on her own without John.  If so, she was brutally disappointed as in her only solo performance she failed miserably.  Thus she realized that as of 1974 her reputation as well as her wealth depended on Lennon.

     It was during Lennon’s absence that John Green came into her life.  While John Green tells a fairly smooth story in his Dakota Years one has the feeling that he is being highly selective in what he tells while he slyly ridicules the Ono-Lennons as their superior.  The attitude easily leads to contempt and from contempt to abuse.  Of course he would have to dissimulate both the contempt and abuse as Ono would be reading the book.  As I imagine, a priest in the Santeria religion, he would have been in the company of  some shady characters.  I don’t know how many actual Yorubas were in NYC but I have met a couple elsewhere.

     One imagines most of the hierarchy Green came into contact with was African or American Blacks.  Santeria involves a deal of ritual sacrifice while money would be needed.  I suspect that John Green was involved in the extortion attempt on the Ono-Lennons.  This may have been Santeria related.  Thus a sort of Black Hand organization was created.  Rather than go for the big money that would have created a stir, the group settled for hitting up people with millions for a mere 200K each.  An unpleasant tax for being rich but one more conveniently paid than to die resisting.

      We have only Green’s version of the extortion and his relationship to it.  He paints himself in a relatively good light.  The Ono-Lennons did call in the FBI, they did give the extortionists newspaper rather than cash as the FBI advised.  But then things went wrong.  The FBI apparently had only one tail on the extortionist who came for the money rather than a series of back ups.  The agent inexplicably lost his man.  The Ono-Lennons never received another call but they had been warned that if they failed to pay, Lennon would be killed whether it took one, two or more years.  In December of 1980 the bill fell due.  On December 8th he was shot.  December 7th is Pearl Harbor Day so there may be a Japanese connection.  Yoko Ono being Japanese, her numerologist and the assassin’s wife -- while Chapman missed the appointed day by one.

     The question then hangs on Mark David Chapman the shooter.  He is still alive and in prison.  He was an assassin as the classic lone nut like Lee Harvey Oswald and any number of assassins who pay the law for the crime while the organizers go free.  The technique has been well known to criminals for centuries.  Any time a lone nut assassinates someone you may be sure that they were a patsy as Oswald announced over TV he was.

     It seems likely that Chapman had been hypnotized.  Witnesses said Chapman acted as though in a trance and he himself said he heard a voice in his head saying:  Do it. Do it. Do it.  The problem would be how he was recruited.  I, of course, can say nothing for certain  while what I am saying now is merely an hypothesis or inquiry.  The main thing is that Chapman was supposed to be a lone nut.  Ridiculous.

     The most obvious recruitment method was the Santeria of which John Green was a member and to which Yoko Ono was sympathetic  There are some oddities in the Chapman story that have to be explained,  not least of which are the large sums of money expended by Chapman in relation to his income.  He was a married man therefore had a wife to support.  Yet in 1978 he was in Japan at the same time as the Ono-Lennons beginning an around the world flight.

     Perhaps Tokyo was the first stop of the trip around the world that then led to Seoul, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Delhi, Israel, Geneva, Paris, London, Dublin, Atlanta and back to Hawaii.  His travel agent was a Japanese woman, Gloria Abe, who he then courted and married.  She is reported to have been involved in occult circles.  She may have seen so involved that, through Takahashi Yoshikawa, Yoko’s numerologist, she was brought in to arrange the trip.  Such an around the world trip in a Westerly direction -- sundown to sunup -- according to Yoshikawa’s numerology would be characteristic of Yoko Ono.  She and Lennon made a round-the-world trip for occult reasons, as did both Lennon individually and John Green at her insistance.  Green made his trip in 59 1/2 hours only leaving a plane once to change to another.  As the financing of Chapman’s trip is unknown I would suggest Yoko Ono.

      Two years after this very costly trip around the world Chapman flew from Hawaii to first Chicago, then Atlanta, then to New York where he landed a few days before the assassination.  Once again, well beyond his means.  It is said that he took paintings to Chicago that he sold.  Where he would have gotten the paintings isn’t known.

Santeria Priestess

     While in Atlanta he contacted a former roommate, then a Deputy Sheriff, Gene Scott, who gave him the hollow point exploding bullets for a handgun.  One assumes such bullets couldn’t be bought over the counter.  One wonders why Scott didn’t ask what Chapman intended to do with them.  And if he did and Chapman told him Gene Scott is clearly an accomplice and should be questioned.

     Chapman himself came from Atlanta where in his teen years he was known to ingest any and all drugs.  Atlanta was also a Santeria center with several weird Black cults.  Lennon’s death took place at the same time as the Atlanta child murders for which Wayne Williams was later convicted.  The Santeria religion has been suspected in these obvious sacrificial murders while John Green establishes a Santeria connection to the Ono-Lennons and Yoko in particular. The Santerists as Africans would be well versed in the use of suggestion and hypnotism.

     Chapman said he was possessed by the Devil while appearing to be in a hypnotic trance.  All this rather amusingly is taking place at the Dakota, the scene of the Devil’s birth in Rosemary’s Baby.  Indeed, the identical apartment.

     After Lennon’s death there was no period of mourning or sense of loss by Yoko.  All Lennon’s assets were in her control and name before his death.  The so-called will of Lennon is suspicious, although the will was unnecessary becaue I doubt if Lennon thought of a will, while the will appointed the art dealer Sam Green as the gaurdian of son Sean in the event the Ono-Lennons perished together.  Lennon wasn’t that enamored of Sam Green.

     Within a few days Sam Havadtoy was installed as Yoko’s live-in where he remained for twenty years.

     While Yoko’s success as an artist and rock n’ roller wasn’t affected by Lennon’s death she now had the money to pay to have her art exhibited.  Even then she found her reputation was indissolubly linked to her dead husband.  She has become a caretaker for the Lennon legend parceling out old recordings, while humiliatingly, Lennon’s artwork is more in demand than hers.

     She seems to have patterned her later career on that of Andy Warhol who as he acquired fame and fortune managed to insinutate himself into certain society circles.  So has Yoko.  Now, at 78, she has attained a certain status although still extremely self-centered while having an appearance of terminal aloneness.

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