Last Year's Echo, Foreword
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yes_2dayWARNINGS: THIS IS ALL FICTION!!!!!! I made it all up. I hope you enjoy.
Foreword
November 25, 2005
Henry was on the phone with John. “The reviews are amazing - incandescent; superlatives in every corner. There hasn’t been a single bad review, John.”
John, in truth, was incredibly relieved. He had made himself almost sick with worry in the last few weeks, and Paul had been put to the ultimate test of caretaking to get John through the anxiety of it all. “Really?” He asked disbelievingly.
Henry smiled into the phone at the childlike voice. “Really,” he emphasized. “What’s more, the advance ordering is incredible. Unlike anything anyone’s ever seen. John, this is going to be a blockbuster. Truly.”
John felt relief - primarily. But he also worried about the exposure, and what it might do to Paul and their family. All the kids had read the book in advance, and they’d had the option to remove material they objected to, but no one had asked him to remove anything. They had all steadfastly supported him: Julian, Sean, Heather, Mary, Stella and James. They had all told him, in essence: go with god. Now John was grateful that at least the book was a critical and financial success. If their lives had to be illumined for the whole world to see, at least it wasn’t a fuckin’ failure! “Thanks for calling,” he told Henry mildly. “I’m going to sleep now.”
John hung up the phone, and turned over on his side to see Paul, also on his side, regarding him. Paul asked, with a touch of insecurity in his voice, “Is everything okay?”
John said, “Apparently it’s a great success.”
“Of course it is,” Paul chuckled.
“Naturally, I knew it all the time,” John boasted, but he had a devilish grin on his face because he knew he just told a gigantic whopper.
Paul punched him on the shoulder. “You put me through hell over it - and I told you all along it was for nothing!”
“I wish I had as much confidence in me as you do,” John confessed. “I’ve been a nervous wreck.”
“When are your interviews scheduled?” Paul asked.
“The London Times interview will be at our business offices on Monday, and then we’ll have to go to New York for my Charlie Rose interview on Thursday.” John was quiet for a few moments and then said, “They’ll be sending us over the first copies tomorrow. I wonder what it will look like.”
*****
It looked beautiful. Lenny was very pleased by the final product. He had never seen that arresting black and white photograph of a 17 year-old John and a 15 year-old Paul, trying to look tough and cool, and leaning against a brick wall. The photo credit was for Mike McCartney. Lenny had met Mike and felt like he knew him - not in person, but through reading the book. John had told him that Mike had found the photo in the recesses of some old box and so it was a brand new early days photo of the famous duo. And the photos tastefully scattered throughout the book were luscious and many of them never published before. The publishers had gone all out in ensuring that the best paper, the best font, the best everything was used in this first issue of the book. Lenny also studied the black and white photo of Lennon on the back cover, hovering over a number of quotes from famous writers. Lenny smiled reflexively. It was taken when John was several years younger, and it was a very flattering photo. Lennon had told Lenny many times that he hated the first photo. He had complained bitterly about it. Lenny had preferred the harshness of the original photo - he felt it was more in tune with the harshness of Lennon’s honesty about himself contained in the book. But then Lennon had pointed out many times in his book that he was vain, and so maybe it was appropriate that the one self-delusion he left in the book was the author photo on the back.
He opened the cover, and began to leaf through the introductory pages, the table of contents, the dedication page. Henry stopped. He hadn’t seen the dedication page before. He chuckled when he read it:
There’s only one person to thank (blame?) for all of this,
And I’m leaving it up to the reader to figure out who it is.
From there Lenny turned the page and the foreword jumped out at him with a gorgeous photograph, followed by several paragraphs of prose that Lenny hadn’t even seen.
FOREWARD
>>>>>>>>
WHY I WRITE
First, let me tell you what this book is not. It is not another endlessly repetitive Beatles anthology. You will not find a list of tour and recording dates, there isn’t a discography or a timeline, and I don’t even begin to discuss everything that happened to me of note. Instead, this is a selective memoir – as all memoirs really are, when you get right down to it. I write about the things I remember that I personally find funny, interesting or noteworthy, but which also shed a light on my personal truth. For those of you who are slow on the draw, that means there are three filters here. One, I write about things I remember, which includes stuff I wrote in letters and diaries, and reminiscences with friends and associates. There is a whole lot of stuff I don’t remember given the passage of time, not to mention a great deal of youthful intemperate drug usage. Two, the events needed to be funny, interesting or noteworthy (at least to me) because I had no desire to write a boring book. And three, I chose to write about events that I believe are relevant to the story I am telling, which may not be the one you want to read.
And let’s be clear about this: the story I am telling is not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Of course, I tried to be objective, but hey, this is me we’re talking about, right? But it is my truth. It’s the narrative I would add to a film of my life story. To the extent that is interesting to you, please enjoy the book. If what you’re looking for is something less subjective or more detailed and thorough, then buy another book. There are seemingly hundreds of them out there to choose from, but I would submit that none of these books are more “true” than mine.
One more editorial comment before I approach the actual subject matter. Throughout the book you will find conversations in quotation marks. I did not make up those conversations. I did not use quotation marks unless I had a corroborating record for it. Usually, it was my Journal, which – starting in the late ‘50s - I wrote in religiously every day, and in which I would repeat entire conversations, complete with quotation marks and a description of body language and facial expressions in many of them. I also did a lot of informal and formal interviews with the “characters” in my life story, and I recorded those and transcribe the conversations here just as they are. So these are actual quotes, actual conversations, and they contain perhaps only minor errors in the event I transcribed them incorrectly when writing in my Journal. If it’s not in quotes, then I’m just paraphrasing or remembering, and there is a very good chance that I might be wrong.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
This book was started, out of order, in 1993. That was the year I was diagnosed with melanoma. It was a particularly aggressive form of cancer, but thankfully it was caught very early on. Still, I went through about 18 months’ worth of chemotherapy and radiation therapy. I had lost every bit of hair on my body. I was the hairless wonder! Even my eyelashes were gone. My skin was a jaded shade of yellow, and the enamel on my teeth – along with my fingernails and toenails – turned a sickly shade of yellowy brown. I was thin when I started out, but I was soon a skeleton because I could literally keep nothing down. I got to the point where I would become very distressed if I saw myself in a mirror. I believed I was going to die, because how could anyone look like that and survive? Vain people like me don’t do very well with the whole ‘chemo’ thing. Paul solved this problem by having all of the mirrors in my house either taken down and put away, or brown wrapping paper was taped to all the mirrors that couldn’t be removed. I was grateful for this. I found out later that he was shaving in the bathroom adjacent to our music room. It was the only mirror in the house that was not covered up. I guess he knew - because of my perpetual laziness - that I would never go there voluntarily. J
I am not a good invalid. I am the type that is overly dramatic, semi-hysterical, and loud about it too. When I wasn’t moaning and whining, I was bored out of my mind and driving everyone crazy. My beloved friend Linda McCartney often looked after me when Paul was busy or couldn’t be there. I blush to think of how rude and obnoxious I sometimes was to her. I even reduced her to tears one time. After this happened, Paul gave me that ‘I mean business’ eyebrow look of his, and said, “You’re a right asshole, John. It isn’t okay. It isn’t okay to take your misery out on others.” He then informed me that my problem was I had too much time on my hands to think about how sick I was, and how I might die. So, his solution was to find me a project I could do from bed.
“What about your journals, John? You’ve been saying for years that you want to organize your journals.” This was true. I had started writing in journals on my 15th birthday in 1955, when I received a blank journal as a present from my Aunt Mimi. But the problem was they were packed away in boxes in 4 or 5 different places, and the oldest ones – the ones from 1955-1962 – were missing. I had left them at Mimi’s house when I moved to London in 1963. Somehow, someway, they went missing. It seemed like a waste of time to work on my journals if the most important ones were missing.
The journals for most of the Fab Four years – 1963 – 1968 – were off in storage somewhere in London. Those got packed away when I left my first wife, Cynthia, and moved out of our house in the suburbs and back to London with Yoko. I had lost track of those as well.
The Yoko Years journals – 1969 – 1980 – were in about 2 or 3 different places. My personal assistant had stolen a few of those after I left Yoko and moved back to London. I had to sue to get those back from him, and they were stored in a different place than the others.
In fact, the only journals I had in my own hot little hands were the ones I had written starting in late 1980, when Paul and I reconciled our friendship.
With everything spread out like that, the thought of trying to organize a search had always defeated me in the past. But Paul was not taking ‘no’ for an answer. He had – as he always does – A Plan. And, as usual, I didn’t want to know the details. From my perspective it has always appeared as though Paul goes off by himself, does some kind of weird magic thing with his hands, and then the desired object materializes! So I was not surprised when 2 weeks later my bedroom door opened and a long conga line of deliverymen started lumping in a bunch of boxes. It seemed like there were at least 30 of them. They were plopped down unceremoniously in the corner of the bedroom, and then they all marched out again.
A few minutes later Paul sailed in, followed by two young women. These were graduate students in library arts from a local university in London. “They’re your research assistants,” Paul announced, introducing them to me.
“What do I do with them?” I asked, fearfully.
“All you have to do is order them around, John. You’re good at that.”
And that was when I started working on this book.
Over the next several years I picked the project up and put it down again several times. I went through numerous iterations of graduate students in library arts. They went spelunking on the Internet for me, did genealogy searches, and went through everything in our archives. (I didn’t even know we had archives until I was whinging to Paul that I didn’t know where my letters from him were, and he said, ‘what about the archives?’ And, naturally, that is exactly where they were.) (Now don’t ask me where the archives are, because I still have no fucking idea.) All of the things they found – letters, photos, documents - led me to change the format of the book from being edited journals to a memoir, with the journals acting as a kind of metronome to keep the time right.
Even as I was filling in the holes with letters and news articles, it began to dawn on me that there were still a lot of periods when my memory was blank, or where I only had one side of a story that really cried out for the other half. That was when Paul suggested I interview the main players (“quick, before they die.”) Naturally, he had A Plan for this too. Over the next few years I interviewed - either formally or informally - just about anyone who featured in my life that was still alive. I was lucky enough to finish my discussions with George Harrison before he died. Among dozens of other interviews, I spoke to Linda McCartney, Richard “Ringo Starr” Starkey, George Martin, Neil Aspinall, and all the EMI engineers and managers, Paul’s brother Michael, both of my ex-wives, my two sons, Paul’s kids, and most of the still living rock stars of the ‘60s and ‘70s. I had the most fun, however, interviewing Paul. Why the hell did I never think to do that before? I pretended to be an objective reporter and I asked him all the things I ever wanted to know about him. The only difference was, Paul couldn’t say “no” to me like he could to a reporter. He had to answer, and it had to be the truth.
The book was pretty much done by 2003. Then I struggled with what to do with it. Part of me wanted never to publish it. Another part of me could deal with the idea of having it published posthumously, when no one who could be hurt by it was left alive. But the third – and the pushiest – part of me wanted to publish it when I was still able to respond to all the idiot commentators who would read what I wrote and get it wrong. I vacillated back and forth. There were a few other stumbling blocks that militated against publishing it while Paul and I were still alive: first, after our former band mate George Harrison was stabbed in his home in 1999 by a deranged fan, the security expert our manager hired to advise us strongly urged us never to talk about our personal lives in the press, because it ”stirs up the crazies”, as Paul likes to say. You give people a glimpse into your life, and the really obsessed ones think it is an invitation specifically for them to come charging in. But there was another, more pressing, concern.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that this is not just John Lennon’s Memoir, it is also John Lennon’s Memoir of Paul McCartney. You can’t separate the stories of our lives. It is impossible. I was unable to just tell my story, because it was inextricably bound to Paul’s. And Paul is an intensely private person who would rather be dragged backwards and bare-assed naked through a blackberry patch than to have his private life lay bare.
On the other hand, I knew Paul would never censor my work. In 1957, when Paul was 15 and I was not quite 17 we collaborated on our first song together. He and I somehow knew even then that this was the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership. We non-verbally made two promises to each other that we kept until 1970. One, we would share joint songwriting credit for every song either one of us wrote no matter what, and two, we would never censor the other one’s work. That meant, even if we hated the other one’s song, we would still have our name on it, and we would still help finish it to the best of our ability. Thus, I helped him on songs like ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, and he helped me on songs like ‘Revolution #9.’ When we started working together again in the ‘80s, we made the same non-verbal promises to each other. Only now we added a third promise: that we would never censor each other’s individual creative work, either. So, I knew Paul would never ask me to change a word of this book, and he would never block publication either. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to take advantage of this fact. Ultimately I believe that this was my only real reason for sitting on the book so long.
>>>>>>>>>>
A question that I am invariably asked by friends, fans, interviewers, and reporters is whether my partnership with Paul is “equal”. I suppose they are asking if one or the other of us is the stronger or more prominent one in our internal dynamic. The most accurate answer I’ve ever heard given in response to that question came from Paul. The occasion was a dinner party, held back in the ‘80s at a friend’s apartment in New York to celebrate the release of our first album together as a duo. Lots of creative people were there, and they were curious about how our partnership worked. When the dreaded question was asked, I was debating with myself whether I should be sarcastic or sincere. Before I could decide, however, Paul responded:
“Of course our partnership is absolutely 50/50. John makes the messes, and I clean them up. John pisses people off, and I calm them down. John loses shit, and I find it. John breaks stuff, and I fix it. John starts fights, and I finish them. I do 75% of the work, John gets 75% of the credit, and we each get 50% of the money. You see? 50/50!”
As everyone laughed, I had a horrible realization. It wasn’t really a joke at all – it was true! How had I done this to my best friend?
That was the moment when I decided to be a grown up: A real live adult who would do his fair share of the heavy lifting. I can’t say that I have fully realized this goal; I am basically, at bottom, a needy, insecure person who believes he was placed on this earth to be served and fawned upon by others. My attitude was, since I was so bloody entertaining, I shouldn’t have to worry about things like bank balances, tax forms, post-production editing, contracts, or any other kind of business. I shouldn’t have to suffer in the company of people I suddenly took a dislike to. They must be removed from my presence immediately, or blood was going to flow. Habits of a lifetime die hard, especially when everyone around me had enabled me for years. But I sincerely did not want to repeat the mistakes I had made in my first partnership with Paul. I most definitely did not want to lose him again. So, I was highly motivated to make this change. And, as the poet Robert Frost once wrote – “that has made all the difference.”
George Harrison was sometimes rude to Paul and me when we were in the Beatles, and even after. He bore a little resentment of our close friendship and our songwriting partnership, and he occasionally took it out on us by making snide offhand remarks. When George was dying of cancer, Ringo, Paul and I all went to see him in his hospital room in New York. The subject of the McLen partnership came up and I was waiting for George to be bitter and sarcastic about it. I tensed up, and looked at Paul, and he was giving me a warning look, as if to say: ‘don’t you dare. I don’t care what he says, just take it on the chin and leave it be.’ But then George – who had been an avid and talented gardener for years - said a beautiful and astonishing thing, which later that night I wrote down in my journal, and quote here:
“I really resented your partnership throughout the whole time I was in the band. It was obvious it was a lot of fun to be in that partnership, and I didn’t like being left out of it. But I have come to understand that you and Paul were like the two different plants I had in my garden for years. I planted them too close together as seeds, and as the years passed, their roots became intertwined. But from above they looked like two completely different plants. So when I decided to remove one of the plants because it was crowding out the other, and I pulled its roots out, the other plant came out too because their root-balls had become one. Both plants could live bound together, or they could die together. There were no other options for those two plants. You two are like that. I’m sorry it took me so long to figure that out.”
In the end, I decided to publish the book before either Paul or I died. Not so I can “answer” any commentators, but as a living testament to my partner, the one and only James Paul McCartney, and everything we’ve accomplished and survived together: our art, our life, and our love.
*****
New York
Charlie Rose Studios
December 6, 2005
“So good to see you again,” Charlie Rose said to John Lennon, as they again sat on a television stage waiting for the show to start.
“It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?” John asked, thinking back to the last time he had been on this show - after his first volume of poetry, and at a time when he was still pretending to the outside world that there was nothing ‘fishy’ going on between Paul and him. Now everyone knew that he had been prevaricating, and there was a little embarrassment for John attached to that. Hopefully, John thought, someone as culturally astute as Charlie Rose will have understood his motives.
That man said, “Indeed it has. A lot of water under the bridge.”
“Thirty seconds!” The two men heard in their headsets. They composed themselves, and soon the red lights on the cameras lit up.
Rose did his usual succinct but glowing introduction, and soon he was leveling his warm smile on John. John was grateful for the friendly face. He hadn’t really faced anyone since the release of his book except the London Times reporter, choosing instead to hide in his sitting rooms at Cavendish and in New York.
“I read your book this weekend - I never put it down. My wife was upset because I wanted to read it through dinner,” Charlie Rose said charmingly.
“Well, I certainly don’t want to come between you and your wife,” John chuckled. “But I’m glad you enjoyed it. What did you like most?”
Charlie was surprised that the question had been served right back in his face, but he was game. “What I liked most is getting to know your partner, Paul McCartney.”
John laughed heartily at that. “Yeah, I exposed him pretty thoroughly in this book. He has spent decades pretending to be ‘Beatle Paul’ with the pretty little smirks and winks. But there is a whole hell lot more to him than that, and one of the best things that has come out of me publishing this book is to hear all these intellectual critics saying, ‘I didn’t know Paul was that smart; I didn’t know he was that solid; I didn’t know he was that funny; I didn’t know he had composed that music.’ They call themselves my fans, but they apparently never wondered why I would spend my life with someone who wasn’t all those things.”
“You yourself take the blame for that, though, in the fascinating section about the aftermath of the Beatles’ breakup,” Rose pointed out. “It was very much different than the story you told to Jann Wenner in late 1971. You had a lot of choice words to say about Wenner.”
“He took total advantage of me. I was in agonizing emotional pain. I had severed myself from all of my closest friends and family, and my birth country, and had given it all up to live amongst a bunch of posturing ‘activists’ and artists in New York. I was hooked on heroin. I was terrified that my abilities wouldn’t translate into success without Paul by my side, and I was also terrified that Paul was going to outstrip me professionally, since he was so much more gifted than me, musically.” John took a deep breath. He laughed. “Sorry about that. I’m a little nervous.”
Charlie Rose’s smile melted John’s heart. “You don’t have to apologize. I ‘get’ what you’re saying: that you were in a very bad and vulnerable place, and you gave that interview, and then no one ever allowed you to retract any of it.”
“Yes!” John cried. “You know, in the mid ‘70s Jann wanted to publish the interview as a book, and I objected. I wrote to him and begged him not to. I told him I had been hurt and angry at the time, and the things I said were not my abiding beliefs. They were the beliefs I had clung to while I was in the throes of an upheaval in my life. He refused to honor my request, and published it anyway. I was very much hurt by that.”
“You make the point that the ‘Lennon Remembers’ article made Wenner’s reputation, and that of his magazine, Rolling Stone, and you felt he kept flogging it as the truth because to do otherwise was to strip the underpinning out from under the enterprise he had created.”
John laughed, regaining his poise. “I was in the unique position of having twice participated in at-length print interviews where I set up an alternative universe for myself, and then was not allowed to live it down. In the end, it is my own damn fault. I really can’t blame anyone else for believing the crap I served up. I did it with Jann Wenner in 1971, and I repeated it with a number of interviewers in late 1980 - the ‘John and Yoko’ interviews.”
“And then three years later you and Yoko divorced.” Rose commented.
“But you know - since you read the book - that my marriage with Yoko was really over in 1972. Maybe even earlier. But by 1972 the bloom was most definitely off the rose,” John said.
“You seemed to be better friends than lovers,” Charlie Rose said generously.
John said, “If we had a friendship, we well and truly scuppered it by trying to remain married to each other for far too long. We hardly ever talk anymore, although when we do it is cordial.”
“One of the most interesting things about your book, John, is that while you address your sexual desires and proclivities, you never provide the reader with a label for yourself. Was that deliberate or inadvertent?”
John liked the question; it was unusual and no one had ever pointed that out to him. He had to think about his answer. “I really don’t know, but I think it was a little of both,” he finally said, in a measured tone. “In the end what I said in the book is what I believe today: that what I feel for Paul defies categories and definitions. I don’t understand it any more than anyone else does. It’s just there. And we tried everything - both consciously and subconsciously - to avoid it. I’ve gone through periods when I was sure I was gay, and then I would be attracted to a woman - I mean really, truly sexually attracted. But then that would wear off. And I wasn’t often attracted to men. I’ve been attracted to men other than Paul, but not enough to really do anything about it. And then the inevitable comparisons would pop in my head, and they’d all come up short, because it is impossible to compete with Paul McCartney.”
“The Paul McCartney you introduce us to in your book just explodes off the page,” Charlie Rose said. “He is what my Jewish friends call a ‘mensch.’”
John laughed. “You can call him whatever you want, but you can’t call him yours. He’s mine, and I’m not sharing.”
Charlie Rose laughed delightedly. As usual, John Lennon was turning out to be a wonderful guest. “The book, as I see it, is three different themes playing in harmony with each other.”
“That’s very clever of you, Charlie, to come up with the music angle,” John joked, showing his smartass side for the first time.
Charlie laughed. “I see it as an elegiac love story, but also a fantastical personal journey, and then it is a piece of cultural history.”
“That’s a lot of fancy words to describe me just opening my mouth and bloviating,” John joked. “My musical, artistic and writing talents are similar - they are completely untutored and instinctual. I remember back in the early ‘60s when a music critic commented that we had Aeolian cadences in one of our early songs. It was a phrase from the song, ‘Not a Second Time’. I got credit for it because it was primarily my song, but in fact Paul had composed that bit of it to solve a technical problem we had with marrying two musical phrases. Still, when we read that in no less than the London Times, we looked at each other like, ‘what the bloody hell?’ because everything we did musically was by ear and by instinct. I feel that way about my prose writing. I don’t know any of the rules. My editor would tell me, ‘That breaks the rules,’ and I would say, ‘so the ‘f’ what! That’s the way I talk!’ So I’m glad that people read it and think it shows some kind of sophistication or erudition that I don’t have, but I don’t want to sit here and pretend like I knew what the hell I was doing, because I didn’t.”
Charlie Rose laughed. “There is a fascinating chapter about your writing process with Paul - when you’re discussing the recording of ‘Sgt. Pepper.’ Your point was how your writing partnership leaked into your personal lives and relationship, and how organic the whole process is.”
“People always ask us - ‘who wrote this?’ ‘Who wrote that?’ And for the longest time we would each earnestly try to answer them. But the truth is, it is almost impossible for us to know where the one leaves off and the other begins. I might write an entire song, but Paul will come up with the musical phrase or a middle-8 that transforms it onto a higher plane. Who wrote that? You tell me! Or, Paul will compose a jaunty melody that is ‘thisclose’ to being too saccharine, and I will add a line of acid that will save the day. Who wrote that? We honestly don’t parse it out like that, or keep track of it, because, as you said, it is an organic process.”
“I love the story you tell about Paul figuring out how to solve the technical problems in ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.’ It was hilarious.”
“He’s a mad genius, is our Paul. I used that anecdote to depict his mad genius, but there are dozens of others I could have used instead. I just picked the funniest one,” John said, chuckling. “If looks could kill, Jane Asher would have killed me that night.”
“That’s another delightful part of the book - the competition you had with Jane Asher for what you call the ‘soul’ of Paul McCartney,” Charlie said.
“Jane was just a continuation of the duel I fought and won with Paul’s father. Paul is a pleaser by nature, and he is attracted to these people who are firm in their absolutes. He tends to be swayed in their direction. If I hadn’t come along - he admits this to me - he would probably now be retired after years of teaching English at some prep school, probably with a family of six children. He’d have been the prof who also conducted the choir on his off hours. I was the siren call. He heard me singing from the rocky shore, and ignored all the warnings and chose my direction.”
Charlie laughed. “The war over the mail was very funny,” Charlie said. “That you could open his mail, but Jane could not...”
“Paul didn’t want Jane opening his mail, because he was always getting mail from his many other lovers. He had four or five other women around the world who thought of him as a boyfriend. Paul didn’t care if I opened his mail, so I used to do it in front of Jane, just to drive her bonkers.”
“The early years - your first meeting - I won’t spoil it for the viewers who haven’t read the book, but there was this very hilarious beginning of your relationship.”
“It certainly began with a ‘pop’, I’ll give you that,” John joked, winking dramatically for the camera.
“You write about the Hamburg years, and that section could be a book all on it’s own. The city itself, the night life, the characters you ran into, the fights, the make-ups, the cavorting up and down the Reeperbahn...”
“You really did read it, didn’t you?” John laughed. “I’m never quite sure if people have, when they say they have.”
“I felt like I was there. It was incredible. In fact - I have to say - the whole story, from beginning to end, was incredible.”
“I’m not dead yet,” John said hopefully. “There may be some more fun in the old boy yet.”
“Well, I’m staying tuned for the updates!” Charlie Rose said, as the camera lights dimmed and the interview ended.
*****