The One to One benefit event, brainchild of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, was inspired by harrowing footage, broadcast in 1972, of Willowbrook State School for young people with intellectual disabilities in New York.
Presented by Geraldo Rivera, then a young investigative journalist, the exposé showed scores of troubled, ill-nourished children left bored and unattended, some covered in their own faeces. “It smelled of disease, and it smelled of death,” Rivera later said.
The two concerts – held at Madison Square Garden, in Manhattan, on August 30th of that year, featuring performances by Lennon and Ono along with their backing group, the Plastic Ono Band – raised more than $1.5 million for children with special needs across the United States.
The gig found Lennon performing both solo songs and some Beatles hits, as well as collaborations with Ono, including Imagine, Give Peace a Chance and Come Together. The event was recorded and eventually released, in 1986, as a live album and film titled Live in New York City. Fans have long expressed dissatisfaction.
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“This was this remarkable concert, which was the only full-length concert that he gave after leaving The Beatles,” says Kevin Macdonald, the director of a new documentary, One to One: John & Yoko.
“If you’re a Beatles or Lennon fan, it’s of huge significance. But it had never really been seen in anything like its full glory, because it was released once on VHS, in 1986, with terrible sound. It was actually Phil Spector, who was a big friend of John’s, who was in charge of the recording. He messed it up.
“It was never re-released. It was only recently, with the advent of technology that allows you to isolate and clean up different aspects of sound, that the family began to think: we can make this sound like they wanted it to sound. Our film is built around that concert.”
Lennon and Ono’s son, Sean Ono Lennon, presided over the concert’s new audio mix and made the initial approach, with a cache of unseen archives, to the documentary maker.
Macdonald was just 13 when John Lennon was shot dead outside his New York City apartment, on December 8th, 1980, but the tragedy registered.
“I remember that very vividly,” he says. “I remember all his music went back in to the top 10. I remember seeing those photos of him with his military jacket on. He was an icon of peace and rebellion. Among my peer group – I think particularly among boys – he was very cool. When you were a teenager and you wanted to change the world, he meant a lot.”
Macdonald, the grandson of the renowned film-maker Emeric Pressburger and the English screenwriter and actor Wendy Orme, has had considerable success with both documentaries and narrative features, directing an Oscar-winning Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland (2006) and crafting documentary portraits of Bob Marley and Whitney Houston.
With this fascinating new film, Macdonald – winner of his own Oscar in 2000 for One Day in September, his documentary about 1972 Munich Olympics hostage crisis – knew he was entering a crowded marketplace. There have been more than a dozen films about Lennon, including the biopics Nowhere Boy and The Killing of John Lennon and the documentaries The US vs John Lennon and The Lost Weekend: A Love Story. Sam Mendes is now set to embark on a series of four dramatic features, each focused on an individual Beatle.
“I thought, well, everything’s been done,” Macdonald says. “How do you make something different about The Beatles? There’s been so many films about them. And now we’re getting the Sam Mendes movies. It took me a while to come up with an idea that was worth doing. We decided to take an artistic approach that gives you a different viewpoint of John and Yoko. When I pitched the idea to Sean Lennon, that’s what he responded to. He liked the idea that it would be an art object in its own right.”
One to One, which opens in August 1971, covers 18 months in the lives of the countercultural power couple. Abandoning their country estate outside London for a small apartment in New York’s West Village, Lennon and Ono mingle with bohemians and activists and soak up American culture and politics through TV.
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An extraordinary archive of phone calls and video footage chronicles campaigning, collaborations and a citywide search for houseflies (for an art installation). Lennon’s interest is piqued when an organisation called the National Association for Irish Freedom tries to get in touch. “All the Beatles are Irish except for Ringo,” he tells a Village Voice journalist, Howard Smith.
The artist’s battle against deportation is prefigured by a telling conversation with Allen Klein, the music-business manager who had represented The Beatles, who attempts to talk Lennon out of performing the politically charged ballad Attica State at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally, a 1971 response to the imprisonment of that author for possession of marijuana. Strange clicks on the line punctuate these phone calls. Decades later, it was revealed that the FBI put Lennon under surveillance that year because of his anti-war activities.
These candid conversations are supplemented by dives into pop culture. Lennon and Ono’s viewing habits form a rich seam of Coca-Cola commercials, anti-war protests, the Attica prison uprising, Richard Nixon, the shooting of George Wallace and, in a mirror image of Lennon’s journey, Charlie Chaplin’s brief return from European exile in 1972.
“Having access to all of this incredible unseen material was amazing. We were spinning through all this lovely black-and-white footage,” Macdonald says. “It’s very early digital stuff. The first-ever home video camera was called a Sony Portapak, and they had one of those.
“When I started looking at all this stuff, and listening to the audio tapes of their phone calls, you get such a feeling of being very intimate with them. None of that is a full story, but there are beautiful little moments to give just a spark of insight into them and into that period. I wanted to make a film that celebrates the nature of what survives: what the shards we leave behind say about us.”
Early in the film Lennon expresses dismay at the venom – still noticeable today – directed towards his wife and creative partner. “The British press actually called Yoko ugly,” he tells the chat show host Michael Parkinson. “You don’t normally see that in the paper about anybody … They even say ‘attractive’ about the most awful-looking people, just to be kind.”
Ono’s heartrending rendition of Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow) during the One to One concert serves as a reminder that she and Lennon went to the US in search of her abducted daughter. (They finally reunited in 1998.)
“During the period of our film they’ve fled from Britain to get away from the after-effects of The Beatles and to look for Kyoko,” Macdonald says. “They were living in a little basement flat in what was a working-class neighbourhood and still part of New York’s meatpacking district.
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“Everyone who I spoke to who knew them said that their door was always opening. People came and went and sat with them on their bed. They were loving being in a city where people weren’t vilifying Yoko. It was a period of great optimism. They were thinking: we can make flower power come back; we can change the world; we can use our celebrity for good.”
The film is an important corrective to the continuing bile directed at the “woman who broke up The Beatles”.
“During that amazing show at the end of the film, Yoko sings Age 39″ – aka Looking Over from My Hotel Window – “at the [first International] Feminist Conference in this beautiful and confessional way,” Macdonald says. “I think that tells you more about who she was and how difficult it was to be married to a Beatle. She was missing her daughter and contemplating suicide.
“I think the first two-thirds is mostly John’s point of view. But it switches around. When they go to the feminist conference John is the only man in the room. That’s amazing. Here’s this macho rock’n’roll star happy to play second fiddle to his wife and to sit and listen.”
It would require a heart of stone not to sympathise with Ono.
“You hear from Yoko what it’s like to be married to him,” Macdonald says. “She says, ‘People thought I’d stolen a monument. People used to think I was a bitch; now they think I’m a witch.’ You suddenly get this other perspective on how difficult it was to be with him.”
One to One: John & Yoko is in cinemas from Friday, April 11th
