The Night John Lennon Died

May Pang

I was John and Yoko's personal assistant for a few years in the early 1970s, and we had a relationship when he and Yoko separated in 1973 for a couple years. I got to show John the everyday life that he didn't get a chance to experience. You want to see the city? Let's go out to an Indian restaurant. Or to get a Whopper. Or, hey, let's hop on a city bus! John was up for anything. Can you imagine seeing a Beatle riding a bus down Lexington Avenue? We did it. We went from the West 80s all the way downtown. It was a weekend and pretty quiet at first, but we started hearing the whispers. “That's John Lennon?” “I think it is!” Somewhere around 14th Street, he looked at me and said, “It's the nose. It's unmistakable.” The whisperings kept getting louder and John eventually said, “OK, then. Time to get off."

John's spirit for life shaped my world. I imagine his voice now. I can almost hear him looking around this year during coronavirus, with all the different factions, with people fighting about wearing or not wearing masks or the nonsense coming out of Washington, and him going, “Are you kidding me? What is this?” I miss that. He made me question authority. I think he made everybody question authority.

I was out with friends on December 8, 1980, and when I got back to my apartment, the phones were ringing. People were telling me the news. Ringo's executive assistant, Joan, had heard about the shooting and rang me from England. She hoped John might still be alive. I said, “Hey, it's over.” I got off and called David Bowie's assistant. I said, “Coco, you better tell David.” She said, “David's out on a date. You shouldn't be alone. Come down here.” I got there and David came in and the three of us stayed up all night, watching the news and crying, and saying, “I just don't understand. How could somebody do something like this?”

Roberta Flack

I was next-door neighbors with John at the Dakota. I heard music through the walls. We were friends. Yoko and I are lifelong friends, and Sean is like a godson to me. But long before all that, John was simply an inspiration.

When I was young, my ambition was to be a classical concert pianist and perform at Carnegie Hall. I got there, but by singing popular music. In 1971, my encore for that concert was the Beatles’ “Here, There and Everywhere.” I was so young and so sensitive and felt the feelings of those songs so deeply. I recorded an entire album of Beatles music in 2012. Their legacy has touched every one of us and will reach far into the future, inspiring people to create and to love each other honestly.

If John were here today, he'd be writing songs about making the world a better place, because that was his goal. He'd be collaborating and encouraging creative expression. He'd be a passionate husband and loving father, and he and I would still be caring friends.

James Taylor

I lived between 73rd and 74th on Central Park West, and the Dakota was the next building down. The day before John was murdered, I stood right in front of the Dakota and a guy attached himself to me in a manic and alarming way. He just started talking a mile a minute at me. Eventually I just sort of scraped him off. I got out of the conversation as soon as possible and made it past my doorman into the safety of my building. But in fact, that was Mark David Chapman, the guy who killed John.

The next night, I'm talking on the phone, sitting in a window that looks out onto the back of the Dakota, when I heard five shots. The shots just reverberated through that courtyard. Booming shots, like from a large caliber weapon, like a .38. I thought to myself, “That's a police shooting right there.” I told my friend on the phone, “You think things are crazy in Los Angeles, I just heard the cops shoot somebody down on the street.”

We signed off, said goodbye. Twenty minutes later she called me back and said, “That wasn't a police shooting, James. That was John Lennon.”

Alexis Denny Kaufmann

I was the first woman hired as a producer on Monday Night Football, and, at 19, I was also the youngest. We had these index cards with information we'd pass to the hosts, say, if a player looked injured or a VIP was in the stands. That night in Miami, the Dolphins were playing New England — big rivalry — and I was in the booth when the producer gave me the news through my headset. Someone shot John Lennon. John Lennon is dead.

It was out of the blue. You're at a football game. You're not thinking about the Beatles. I didn't know what it all meant. The Dakota apartments? And a peacenik like John Lennon? How senseless! But I wrote it down and waited for the exact second to hand off the card. Frank Gifford was doing the play-by-play, but in big moments, you always went to Howard Cosell, because Howard had the voice. Howard had the gravity. Howard always told us sports wasn't life and death. It's just a game. But this was different. In those days, with only three networks, we had more than half the country tuned in. Howard would be the messenger.

"Remember this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses,” he said. “An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City …"

It was like Walter Cronkite telling us about JFK. In an instant, everyone everywhere knew. Communal communication. If you got the news from Howard that night, you probably still know where you were.

Jamie Lee Curtis

I had the unfortunate legacy of hosting Saturday Night Live that week. John died on a Monday night and the next morning, going into 30 Rock to prepare for Saturday's show, the offices were silent. Normally it's raucous with people playing music and laughing. The only sound I remember were sobs from behind closed doors. We talked about canceling and probably should have. The show had no energy.

You could say I was a Paul girl. Then probably George, then Ringo, then John. I wasn't a rule breaker. And I was only 21. I barely had any life experience. I was a girl from L.A., and New York scared me. Because I was sheltered, I didn't know anyone who had died, and I wasn't in touch with mortality yet. Everyone around me was devastated, but I just couldn't feel it fully. Sometimes you have the experience but miss the meaning.

Now I'm 62 and I understand it completely. John was the hero of a generation. He was a husband, a father to a little boy. We all lost something when we lost him, and the tears are coming now as I think about it.

Bob Gruen (friend and photographer)

Oh, I remember the good times. John was a fantastic guy to hang out with. I always learned something. We always laughed. John was into food, so we always ate well. What I miss is the adult version of the highly perceptive, highly charismatic person he'd be today. But you can't do coulda, shoulda, woulda. We had John for 40 years, and that was the time we got for the good messages to get through.

John was so proud to live in New York. People recognized him but he could still go out, ride taxis, visit friends. We were doing a shoot one day and I gave him a shirt that said NYC on it. The picture became iconic, I think, because it shows how readily available and open he was. That's how I remember John. Especially at the end, he was in a strong place. He'd done a great deal of introspection. He took great responsibility for his family and his health.

I'd taken a series of pictures in the studio with John and Yoko that final weekend. I left the studio early Saturday morning. The sun was coming up. That Monday I was in the darkroom hoping to get to show him the photos before my 2 a.m. deadline at the Village Voice. My doorman rang my buzzer and asked if I was listening to the radio. Then my friend Toby called from California. I had all kinds of thoughts when I heard the news. The finality of it was devastating. I'm someone who likes to fix things, but this was something nobody could fix.

Elliot Mintz (spokesman and friend)

We did a phone interview. That's how we met. It was the night after John turned 31, and the subject of our conversation was old age. He imagined himself late in life living on an island off the coast of Ireland or Cornwall with Yoko, looking at their scrapbook of memories together. Would he be making music at this age? I don't know. Would he be writing op-ed pieces? Maybe. Would he be on the streets with a bullhorn? Maybe. John was a chameleon. I only wish he was still here to show us.

On December 8, 1980, I was at my house in Laurel Canyon in L.A. when I received a phone call from my mother. There was a tinge of concern in her voice and I somehow sensed something else was going on, so I booked myself on the last flight out. I didn't hear the news until I got on the plane. I landed without a plan and hailed a cab to 1 West 72nd Street. The police barricades are still indelible in my brain. I crossed over the bloodstained entranceway and went upstairs. Took a deep breath. Knocked on the door. “Yoko, it's Elliot.” No response. “I'm going to sit on the floor. Open the door when you want me to come in.” Eventually, she did. I spent the next three weeks with her.

I considered John and Yoko my best friends. We had spoken for hundreds of hours, shared birthdays and holidays together. I had gotten to know them as brother and sister. But those first few days were a fog. I remember someone handed me the phone and it was Ringo. I met him a block away, got him through the back entrance and up into the bedroom. He and his wife were the first outside guests. Ringo looked at Yoko and said, “I know exactly how you feel.” And she responded, “No, you don't, and I'm glad you're here.” There was something lost the day John died that transcends his death as well as his vision. For our generation, it was the loss of innocence and hope.

We will still be talking about John 100 years from now. He'll remain a constant presence, and he'll be cross-referenced in a zillion things having to do with music, pop culture and history. What will be absent is the sensibility. The way John made you feel. What I fall back on is not necessarily the intellect or even the musical genius but the wit. We spent most of the nine years together laughing, not pondering. As a student in college in the ‘60s, I had to interview a celebrity, and Jayne Mansfield somehow said yes. Jayne Mansfield! She was very kind, but at a certain point she cut the interview short for “an appointment.” This was 1964 in Los Angeles. It turns out she was meeting John and the boys, who were big fans. John loved Jayne, and I later teased him that I knew her first. Without missing a beat he said, “Yeah, but she left you for me."

Patrick Duffy

For me that time period was the confluence of the highest high with the lowest low. Dallas was the number one show on television at the time, with everyone asking, “Who shot J.R.?” But the stun of John Lennon's assassination was immediate and took the hubris out of our celebrity. We were filming at the time in Los Angeles, and we all realized, no matter how good things are going, terrible tragedies can happen, too.

It doesn't lessen your respect for honoring someone to say you gather yourself and continue. I lost my wife three years ago. The loss never gets better, but you get better at walking around that giant pit. That's true when monumental people like John Lennon pass, too.

Every year there is that gathering in Central Park, and the annual mourning is now really a celebration. You don't think about how John died. You think about the wonder of who he was.

I flash back to that seminal moment as a college student in southern Illinois. Me and a bunch of kids from school were out at a restaurant, and on the far side of the room was a black-and-white TV with people screaming. It was the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and I stood there, stunned. All these years later, I'd say way over half the songs I can hum and sing by heart are Beatles songs. And now, at a time of so much uncertainty and unrest around the world, John's outlook is still in me. I remember him saying that in order for there to be world peace, there has to be peace in the whole world. That means each country has to be at peace. Each village in each town, each person in each house. So, peace really starts with you and me! Give peace a chance and maybe we can all come together. Those were John's words, and they belong to all of us now.