My book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon has been under scrutiny for 25 years. Since early 2000, when the publisher first distributed advance reader copies, I've done somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 interviews. I often think I've been asked and have answered every possible question. But sometimes I'm surprised.
Last week I participated in a… let's call it a panel discussion though it was probably more of a debate, on Robert Rodriquez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, broadcast date TBA. Rodriguez and Carole Kirstein-Chase, an attorney, acted as moderators. The other panelist was David Whelan, author of Mind Games, a book that suggests a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Mark David Chapman to be a Manchurian patsy, that he did not shoot Lennon, and that there was a second shooter who got away.
My contention is that similar conspiracy theories have been circulating for 44 years, none of them have come to anything, and Chapman did it.
Nowhere Man's "Chapter 27," named after the so-called missing chapter of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, is about Chapman's sentencing hearing, which I attended. (Whelan disputes that I was there.) In the chapter, I quote Chapman saying, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." I also say that this is what he told a psychiatrist after a suicide attempt.
Whelan asked me three questions about this quote that I'd never been asked: Why isn't it in the court transcript? Why did nobody else report it? Why is there no mention anywhere else of him saying this to a psychiatrist?
I didn't know, and I told the story behind the Chapman section of Nowhere Man: When Soft Skull Press accepted the book, in 1999, it was about Lennon's final years and ended when John was alive. There was no Chapman section. Soft Skull's publisher asked me to write one. I didn't want to. He insisted. I thought about it and decided that because I'd attended the sentencing hearing I could write something original and worthwhile.
In late 1999, I wrote Part IV of the book, "The Coda," about Chapman. It's based on my memory, accounts in newspapers and other books, and notes I took in August 1981 at the sentencing hearing.
In "Chapter 27" I say that Chapman said what he did about the bloodied prizefighter immediately after he read from The Catcher in the Rye but before the judge sentenced him to 20 years to life.
I suppose it's possible that the court reporter simply didn't hear Chapman say that.
But after thinking about it for a couple of days it occurred to me that maybe I had the events slightly out of sequence. Maybe Chapman said it after the judge sentenced him, the hearing was over, and the court reporter had stopped transcribing.
I flashed on a scene from 43 years ago: The judge pounds his gavel, dismisses the court, and Chapman, handcuffed, standing by his chair, facing sideways towards me, a cop on each arm, is about to be led out of the courtroom. That's when he says, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." But nobody's paying attention. The reporters have their stories, they're on deadline, and they're clamoring to get out. And that's when I write of Chapman, "He walks fearlessly out of the courtroom, holding his head high, veritably glowing with pride. He's done what he came to do."
Whelan questions if this description of Chapman is accurate because nobody else reported it.
Maybe I was the only reporter there who knew that the story wasn't over, and there was one more thing to see and hear.
And by the way, the following quote can be found on page 145 of the Chapman bio Let Me Take You Down, by Jack Jones. This is Chapman speaking to a psychiatrist in Hawaii: "I think of myself as a boxer in the twenty-seventh round with my face all bloody, my teeth knocked out and my body all bruised."
Note to Whelan: Go to Let Me Take You Down in Google books and search for "twenty-seventh round." Comes right up.
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