Robert Rosen

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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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

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Normally, I'm less than satisfied with my readings, but this one, last night at 2A, is one of my better performances, and Michael Paul did a nice job capturing it on video. I'm reading from my book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon.

The first part is the opening section of the chapter titled "Being Rich." The second part is all of "Chapter 27," my eyewitness account of the sentencing hearing of Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman, who believed that by shooting the ex-Beatle, he'd write the missing chapter of J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye in Lennon's blood.

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They were into wordplay, John and Yoko, especially when it came to their names, which lent themselves to a variety of combinations, like Lenono Music and Discono, a title John suggested for one of Yoko's LPs. In that spirit, I'm calling this post "Lennonight," which will take place at 8:00 PM, on Tuesday, October 15, in the upstairs lounge of the 2A bar in the East Village.

This is number four in the Tuesday night reading series that Eric Danville, Lainie Speiser, and I have been producing. We've christened our spoken-word collective Title TK, and Listen to This Reading is our celebration of John Lennon's birthday--he would have been 73 on October 9.

I’m going to read from my Lennon bio, Nowhere Man, specifically the opening chapter, “Being Rich,” the closing chapter, “Dakota Fantasy,” and “Chapter 27,” which is a reference to the nonexistent chapter of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the novel that drove Mark David Chapman to murder.

Mary Lyn Maiscott, who’s more accustomed to performing with a guitar in hand, will read from “Birth of a Song,” the Nowhere Man chapter that explores the inspiration behind Lennon’s “I’m Losing You,” which Mary Lyn covered at the first Bloomsday on Beaver Street.

Lainie will read from May Pang’s memoir, Loving John.

Other readers include actor David Healy, adult actress Alia Janine, actor James Sasser, and radio personality Ralph Sutton.

As always, admission is free and there’s no cover.

In other Title TK news, Lexi Love has created a long-awaited Bloomsday on Beaver Street page on her Website. The page features some very cool photos and the complete audio of her reading that night. Check it out for a taste of the unexpected drama you can expect on October 15, at 2A Read More 

Of all the banned books in the world to read from, and there are thousands, why am I reading from J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye at the Banned Book Week event at 2A tomorrow night? Because of the connection between that book and Nowhere Man, my John Lennon bio. As I will explain at the reading, The Catcher in the Rye is a book that drives people crazy. And it has 26 chapters. Mark David Chapman read it and decided to kill John Lennon--to save the world from Lennon's phoniness. He believed that by killing Lennon he'd write Chapter 27 in Lennon's blood and then he'd literally disappear into the book to become the Catcher in the Rye for his generation.

I wrote about all this in Nowhere Man. In the last section of the book, “The Coda,” I detail Chapman’s descent into madness as he travels from Hawaii to New York to carry out his mission. In the book’s final chapter, “Chapter 27,” I describe Chapman’s 1981 court hearing, which I attended as a journalist. Rather than stand trail, Chapman pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years to life. In the courtroom, as his statement to the world, he read from chapter 22 of The Catcher in the Rye, the part where Holden Caulfield tells his sister that he wants to be the catcher in the rye.

None of this has anything to do with why the book was banned. It was banned because Holden talks too much about sex. And Salinger captures his voice perfectly, which is the real magic of The Catcher in the Rye.

Hope you can stop by and listen to all the readings. And please check out this excellent article in Adult Video News about the event, and banned books in general. Read More