LENNON´S RETURN / THE NEW YORK TIMES ( RECOMMENDED READING )

December 10, 2010, 9:00 pm

Lennon’s Return

By DICK CAVETT

When I entered their room, bed is where the Lennons were.

I’m afraid that sentence seems to promise more than will be delivered. Let’s come back to it.


The buzz was all over town. The Lennons — yes, “those two” — had agreed to come on the Cavett show.


In truth, they had all but fully agreed to. As a condition, they’d asked that we meet before they said a final yes; presumably as a test for possible incompatibility. There proved to be, mercifully, anything but.


Had they not done the show I would have been sorry, of course, to miss enjoying the envy of all the shows that didn’t get them first. Or at all.


Yoko was quite sweet and cordial, and John and I got on instantly. He was too complex a man to be described in a few adjectives, but one of them would have to be “accessible.” He was easy and comfortable immediately, and I’m sorry I can only recall a single example of the sort of relaxed banter we exchanged from the start.


He said, “I guess the reason we feel we’d like to do this is that you have the only half-way intelligent talk show on television.”


“Are you sure you want to be on a show that’s half-way intelligent?” I ventured.
John laughed. Then he put me in a movie.
.
I stood against a wall with several other people and we simulated passing a whispered joke from right to left. I’m not sure what the joke was but I’m told it did end up in the film. No other immediate movie offers poured in.


John said that just before I got there they had filmed a dream sequence there in the hotel room in which Yoko imagines she is dancing with Fred Astaire. Yoko played herself and the male part was played by Fred Astaire. (They had run into him in the lobby.)

Now, about that bed. They were not so much in bed as on bed. This was at the St. Regis Hotel.


It was such a vast specimen that I wondered if they had had it specially constructed to be bigger than king-size. (Kingdom-size?) Its half-acre of surface seemed to serve as their work area. Various notebooks and papers and odd objects and drawing pads and projects populated its surface. There must have been another bed somewhere in the regal suite for mere sleeping.


They did the show. Twice in fact. The first show was a smash, getting better as it went along. They were nervous at first, evidenced by their killing half a pack of Viceroys between them in the first few segments, settling down gradually into what proved a delightful and increasingly smoke-free 90 minutes.


Later, I ended up testifying on John’s behalf when the Nixon White House was trying to have him deported (here’s an account of that episode).


But I didn’t see much of the Lennons between those shows and John’s awful death.


John and I exchanged a few letters, his in an entertaining and distinctly James Joycean style. I tried to find them for a quote here. My optimistic view is that I have only misplaced them.


Had I lived where I do now I might have heard the fatal shots. I asked someone who was there to remind me: did John know he had been shot? A policeman, I’m told, in the race to the hospital, asked John if he was aware what was happening and did he know who he was. He did.


I recall getting a good bit of hate mail for a remark I made at the time about the gun lobby and how democratic they were in including the mentally ill among those with easy access to firearms.


I just watched one of those shows on DVD. In a moment I’d forgotten, John is light-heartedly contemplating old age. “Some day we’ll be an old couple living on the south coast of Ireland, saying [feeble old codger voice], ‘I remember when we were on “The Dick Cavett Show.” ‘”


It wasn’t poignant at the time.