There is an enduring legend, largely fuelled by disgruntled ex-employees with axes to grind, that, in his latter years, John Lennon became a virtual recluse.
Holed up in his vast apartment in the Dakota, a forbiddingly gothic mansion block in New York, the most famous member of The Beatles supposedly came to resemble Howard Hughes, the eccentric tycoon who never cut his hair and nails and lived in a sanitised hotel suite for fear of catching germs.
Inviting as this image is, it just isn't true. What is true, however, is that the John of these times was a very different person from either the zany pop star or the drugged-out, spaced-out, wild man of rock he had been. For the first time in his life he had responsibilities.
When he and his wife, Yoko Ono, got back together in 1975 after a 14-month separation, they renewed their wedding vows. Dressed in white, in a candlelit ceremony in an all-white room surrounded by banks of white carnations, it was as if they were being born again.
John had come home from what he referred to as his 'Lost Weekend' with all the demons seemingly exorcised from his system - the drunkenness, the sexual ravenousness, the jealousy and possessiveness. Everything but the insecurity and self-doubt, the products of his Liverpool childhood, that nothing and no one could change.
• Abridged extract from JOHN LENNON: THE LIFE by Philip Norman, published by HarperCollins at £25. © Philip Norman 2008.
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