Robert Rosen

For the better part of the past 12 years I've been excavating my memory for material. A Brooklyn Memoir, set in Flatbush when I was a child, is one result of this excavation. I began writing the book with only an image in my head of my father in his candy store, in 1961, and a germ of an idea: Something interesting was happening at this time and in this place, and it was worth exploring. What I learned over the many years I worked on the book is that if you think about something every day for an extended period of time, you're going to remember things you thought were long forgotten, and the more you remember the more you remember.

 

I bring this up now because of my debate with a conspiracy theorist about the murder of John Lennon that will go live on Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, sometime in December. As misguided as I find David Whelan and his theories about who really killed Lennon, and as sloppy and ill-informed as some of his research is (I discuss it here and here), I give him credit for getting me to consider certain things I haven't thought about in the 25 years since I wrote the Mark David Chapman section of Nowhere Man. For example, there's a scene where Lennon, the afternoon before the murder, signs Chapman's copy of Double Fantasy. I wrote that Chapman asked him for a job. Whelan says that I'm the only one who reported this and demanded to know where I got the information. I told him I got it from Lennon's assistant Fred Seaman.

 

Whelan says that Seaman wasn't there to witness the exchange. According to Seaman's memoir, The Last Days of John Lennon, he was there.* A former Lenono Music employee reminded me who was also there to witness it. Paul Goresh, who died in 2018, is the photographer who took the picture of Lennon signing Chapman's album.

 

The week of December 8, 1980, Seaman came to my apartment. It was the first time I'd seen him since Lennon was killed. One of the things we talked about was Chapman asking John for a job. And now that I think about it, I can almost hear him say that he heard the story from Goresh. Can this detail of a 44-year-old memory be trusted? I don't know. But if he did hear about it from Goresh, it would make sense. Seaman and Goresh knew each other, they did talk on occasion, and it seems likely that they would have discussed the photo.

 

Whelan also got me thinking about the conversation I had with the publisher of Soft Skull Press when he asked me to write about Chapman. What I'd forgotten was that he'd originally wanted me to write that Chapman was part of a conspiracy. I refused. I told him I didn't believe it. At the time, I'd given little thought to the idea of a conspiracy—it would be several months before an insane conspiracy theorist would say I was a CIA archivist who was somehow involved in the plot to eliminate Lennon. (Several years later, an even crazier conspiracy theorist would say I was a CIA spymaster who plotted with Ronald Reagan and Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, to assassinate the ex-Beatle.)

 

I told the publisher I could write a better story if I wrote what felt true: Chapman, suffering from severe mental illness, acted alone.

 

My only purpose in writing the Chapman section of Nowhere Man was to tell a compelling story that would give people some understanding of a seemingly inexplicable act. I wrote it as a thriller. I got inside Chapman's head just as I'd gotten inside Lennon's head. And to write about Chapman was liberating after feeling that Yoko Ono and her attorneys were looking over my shoulder as I was making the final corrections on the main Lennon section of the manuscript. I think it's this combination of style and information that has kept people reading Nowhere Man for a quarter of a century.

 

A critic for the British music magazine Mojo noticed. "Rather like reading a favorite detective story," he wrote. "Though you know how the story's going to end, you still wind up willing the events to unfold differently."

______

*During the Whelan debate, I'd forgotten that Seaman had written in his memoir that he was there when Lennon signed Chapman's album. In the unlikely event that Whelan was able to interview Seaman, as he said he was going to do, I'd like to know if Seaman contradicted his memoir. So numerous are Whelan's misstatements, I'm now also wondering if it's true, as he claimed during the debate, that Chapman's statement, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round," is not in the court transcript. (See my previous post, "The 27th Round.")

______

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

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X, Instagram, or my recently launched Threads.

Last week, in a post titled "The 27th Round," I wrote about David Whelan, a conspiracy theorist whom I sort of debated—Whelan mostly talks, interrupts, and talks some more—on an episode of Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, scheduled to go live sometime in December. Whelan believes that a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Mark David Chapman, the man currently in prison for the murder of John Lennon, to be a Manchurian patsy who didn't shoot the ex-Beatle—the real killer is a professional assassin who got away.

 

I, in short, don't believe it.

 

Whelan went into his investigation with the preconceived notion that Lennon was the victim of a conspiracy. Consequently, everything looks to him like a clue pointing in the direction of conspiracy and nobody is above suspicion, with the possible exceptions of Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, who was five at the time of the murder (but now, Whelan says, knows more than he's letting on).

 

In an episode of SATB released October 10, after the debate was recorded, Rodriguez interviewed Whelan again. Whelan, who wrote a conspiracy-theory book, Mind Games, and shares his theories on Substack and in many interviews, says that much of what I say about Chapman in Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon is "laughable." This is an unsurprising response from somebody I've called a "conspiracy hustler" because he misrepresented himself to Lennon's assistant Michael "Tree" Medeiros in order to get him to agree to an interview. Whelan denies he did this.

 

"I gave the producers of the UK documentary John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial extensive video interviews, which were never used in the final cut," Medeiros says. "A few days after those interviews, I got a phone call from David Whelan, who said he called to check my quotes for the doc. This turned out to be untrue. I believe he was fishing for additional info for his crazy conspiracy theory book."

 

It would be an exercise in tedium if I were to refute all of Whelan's misstatements in our debate, in his recent SABT interview, on his blog, and in his book, which I've made a point of not reading because it's clear what he thinks from reading his blog and listening to his interviews. But I do want to point out two of his misstatements in the October 10 SATB interview.

 

Whelan says that in Nowhere Man, I called Chapman "an art dealer," and that it's "laughable" that I say he raised the money to travel from Hawaii to New York City by selling a few pieces of art.

 

This is what I say in Nowhere Man:

 

Chapman fancies himself an art aficionado. For years he's been acquiring paintings, lithographs, objets d'art. First he sells a $5,000 Salvador Dali gold plaque, originally purchased with a loan from his father-in-law. Then, with a $2,500 loan from his mother, he purchases a Norman Rockwell print titled "Triple Self Portrait." Shrewdly, he's able to sell it to a collector for a good profit.

 

I based this paragraph on details I found in the Chapman bio Let Me Take You Down, by Jack Jones, who interviewed Chapman in prison. The book was the definitive source of information about Chapman's life when I wrote about him in Nowhere Man in 1999. Whelan thinks Let Me Take You Down is worthless and questions if Jones is really a journalist. (He was a reporter and columnist on The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.)

 

It's the same book I cited in my "27th Round" post. Whelan, in the debate, said that I'm the only writer who quoted Chapman at his sentencing hearing saying, "I feel like a bloodied prizefighter in the 27th round." (Whelan questions if I really attended the hearing—yes, I did.) And he said that no information exists indicating that, as I wrote in Nowhere Man, this is what Chapman told a psychiatrist after a suicide attempt. I directed Whelan to the page in Let Me Take You Down that has this information. Let Me Take You Down, apparently, is impervious to Whelan's research techniques. (Pro tip: Look in the index.)

 

Whelan gave me a sense of what his research techniques might be during the debate. He said that I was the only one who reported that Chapman asked Lennon for a job when John signed his copy of Double Fantasy outside the Dakota the afternoon before the murder. He asked me where I heard this. I said that Lennon's assistant Fred Seaman told me about it several days after the murder. If Seaman was not there to witness this, as Whelan claims, then somebody who was there must have told him about it. I saw no reason why Seaman would lie about this particular detail. So I took his statement at face value and included it in Nowhere Man.

 

"I'm going to ask Seaman," Whelan said.

 

Will Seaman remember what he told me in passing 44 years ago? Unlikely, but who knows? And even if Seaman remembers, would he deny it? Possibly. But let's stick to the most likely scenario of this imagined interview: Seaman doesn't remember, which gives Whelan what he wants—a contradiction that raises suspicions of... something.

 

Whelan's other misstatement in the October 10 podcast involves Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA employee in charge of their MK-ULTRA mind-control program, the agency's attempt to create programmed assassins (or patsies, as the case may be) with a combination of drugs and hypnosis. Whelan says it's "laughable" that I take Gottlieb at his word that MK-ULTRA was a failure. It's not that I take Gottlieb at his word, though he would have known more about the program than anybody, and the possibility exists that he could have been telling the truth. My point was that there's no credible evidence to prove that MK-ULTRA was successful. Of course, there's no credible evidence to prove that it was a failure, either. The CIA destroyed their MK-ULTRA files in the 1970s. It's this lack of evidence that conspiracy theorists use as proof that it's possible to create programmed assassins who will commit murder at a specific time, in a specific place, in a specific way, and the CIA as well as some mysterious right-wing entities have, indeed, created such assassins (and patsies).

 

I have no doubt that it's possible to use MK-ULTRA techniques to get certain people predisposed to violence to commit mayhem. What I don't believe is that it's possible to control somebody for weeks and months at a time, as if they're a robot, before the command is given to commit mayhem—or to induce somebody to believe they're committing mayhem, as would have been the case with Chapman.

 

Like virtually all conspiracy theories, this one will never be proven or disproven. Without certainty, what's left is common sense and Occam's Razor, a philosophical concept that says if you have two or more theories to explain an event, the simpler, more straightforward one is usually correct.

 

And I do wonder: If a number of Whelan's statements about me are false, which he should have known from basic research, what else is wrong with the "facts" he uses to attempt to show that a mysterious right-wing cabal programmed Chapman to be a Manchurian patsy who did not kill Lennon?

 

I'll leave it to a more dedicated researcher to pick apart Whelan's thesis, line by tedious line.

______

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

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X, Instagram, or my recently launched Threads.

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.

______

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

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X, Instagram, or my recently launched Threads.

If there's a better Beatles podcast than Something About the Beatles, I haven't found it. What makes SATB great is its host, Robert Rodriguez. His knowledge of the Fab Four is PhD level and his interviews often explore territory well beyond rock music. For example, in episode 286: Nowhere Man '24 with Robert Rosen, Rodriguez and I got into a discussion of MK-ULTRA, the CIA mind-control experiments. In in the 1950s and 60s, the agency used drugs like LSD and heroin, mostly on unwitting prisoners, in an attempt to create programmed assassins commonly known as "Manchurian Candidates."

 

This subject came up because conspiracy theorists believe that the man who assassinated John Lennon, Mark David Chapman, was either a Manchurian Candidate or a "Manchurian Patsy"—someone who took the fall for the murder when there was really a second gunman who shot Lennon.

 

I don't believe this and I said so on the podcast and in my book Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, in the extensive Chapman section and in a chapter titled "A Question of Conspiracy." Rodriguez, though, doesn't discount this possibility. Yet our conversation remained respectful, informative, and factual, both of us presenting our evidence as if in a courtroom, and letting listeners make up their own minds.

 

We also discussed my trip to Spain earlier this year, where Beatlemania lives. At La Tregua nightclub, in Sevilla, I presented the Spanish edition of Nowhere Man, and my wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, joined Aida Vílchez, Martín León Soto, and the Nowhere Band, to perform Beatles and original songs for a packed and enthusiastic house. You can watch a video of the event here.

 

In addition, we touched on Lennon's friend and gardener Michael "Tree" Medeiros and his memoir, In Lennon's Garden, that Yoko Ono continues to repress; how information in May Pang's documentary, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, meshes with information in Nowhere Man; and Lennon's fascination with "lucid" or programmed dreams.

 

This was my fourth appearance on SATB. I look forward to a fifth, and after you listen to episode 286 (and perhaps a few others), I hope you'll understand why I think SATB rocks.

______

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

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

In December 2021, I wrote an article for The Village Voice about Michael Barbosa Medeiros, John Lennon's gardener, personal assistant, archivist, and friend. John couldn't remember Michael's last name and called him "Mike Tree."

 

The Voice article, "Mike Tree in John Lennon's Nutopia," was in part about a memoir Michael had written about working with John and Yoko Ono beginning in 1977 and continuing until 1982, 18 months after John was murdered.

 

Michael sold John Lennon: Barefoot in Nutopia to Diversion Books. They changed the title to In Lennon's Garden and were supposed to publish it in 2020. But Ono's attorneys threatened legal action and now, four years later, Diversion has still not published the book and they refuse to return the rights. The book remains in Limbono.

 

Michael wanted to wait until Barefoot in Nutopia was available before he spoke publicly about his relationship with John and Yoko.

 

In 2022, I went on Robert Rodriguez's podcast, Something About the Beatles, to discuss Michael and how Yoko is able to suppress books that refute her narrative of John as the happy househusband. The episode is called "Catch and Kill."

 

This month Michael, now 84, agreed to talk with Robert about the book and life with John and Yoko. It's an amazing episode of Something About the Beatles: intimate, detailed, surprising, and honest. Among Michael's many revelations is that John wanted him to become romantically involved with Yoko.

 

Please do give it a listen.

_______

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

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

 

Robert Rodriguez and I covered a lot of ground when we spoke recently on his podcast, Something About the Beatles. We talked in detail about the new edition of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, which has 45 pages of supplementary material, a new introduction, and innumerable corrections, revisions, and additions. And we talked about the reading I'm doing tonight, October 4, at 6 p.m., at Subterranean Books in St. Louis, my first public event in almost four years, since the beginning of the pandemic. And we talked about the book I'm working on, tentatively titled No Future, which is set at a radical student newspaper at the City College of New York in the 1970s, as the student left is giving way to the forces of punk.

 

In the course of discussing the many dramas surrounding the publication of Nowhere Man, the subject of Yoko Ono's 2002 copyright infringement lawsuit against Fred Seaman came up. I was subpoenaed to testify at that trial as a witness for Ono, and I told Rodriguez about the bizarre cross-examination Seaman's lawyer subjected me to. Fresh out of law school, the attorney was up against Ono's high-priced, well-prepared legal team that had both the facts and the law on their side, in a high-profile trial that dominated the front page of the tabloids. For the young lawyer, it was a baptism of fire.

 

Ono's lawyer questioned me first, and I told a story that was, essentially, the same story I tell in the Nowhere Man chapter titled "John Lennon's Diaries." Except this time I told it under oath.

 

Then Seaman's attorney had at me. The first rule of cross-examination is: Never ask a question you don't know the answer to. This cross-examination was a series of shots in the dark, the attorney hoping to hit on something, anything, that would discredit me. His first question was (and I'm paraphrasing throughout): "Did you burglarize Fred Seaman's apartment?"

 

I looked at him like he was crazy. "No," I said, realizing that Seaman must have believed that Ono was somehow able to force me to do this.

 

"Is this the first time anybody asked you that question?"

 

"Yes."

 

I don't recall exactly where the cross-examination went from there, only that the attorney asked me a lot of questions that did his client no good whatsoever. But I do recall his last three questions:

 

"Did you believe John Lennon wanted you to have his diaries?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Do you still believe that?"

 

I thought about it for a few seconds, and I'm told it was a very dramatic moment. "Yes," I finally said.

 

"Did you pay taxes on the money Yoko Ono paid you?"

 

This was his last desperate attempt to discredit me, and it pissed me off. "I sure did," I said.

 

The lawyer turned and walked back to his seat.

 

Ono won her case.

_______

Please join me for a discussion of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon tonight, October 4, 6 p.m., at Subterranean Books in St. Louis.

 

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

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X (the site formerly known as Twitter) or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

 

It's been a long time coming but now it's here. For the first time in 20 years, an updated and expanded paperback edition of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon is available—for the moment exclusively from Amazon, but soon in all the usual online places as well as your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

The 2022 Nowhere Man contains six new chapters, including Mersey Beat founding editor Bill Harry's interview with me; a discussion of conspiracy theories surrounding Lennon's murder; and a new introduction, "In My Own Write," that grapples with the question: Did I have the right to tell this story?

 

You can also check out Robert Rodriguez's interview with me on his podcast, Something About the Beatles. In this episode we talk about Yoko Ono's efforts to suppress unauthorized narratives about her and John, especially those that discuss the information in Lennon's diaries... like Nowhere Man.

________

My latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, is available on Amazon, Bookshop, all other online booksellers, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.