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But finally a shoot wasn’t canceled. The crew was waiting outside, along with two New York policemen assigned by the city to keep watch. In the coffee shop Yoko sat frozen in a corner. She appeared to be easily as uptight as I was.
John must have sensed this, so he stood up and we all followed him out onto Seventy-first Street and then into the park.
There was no script. The park walk arose when I asked Yoko what she wanted to do. “Well, 1 don’t know. We could walk in the park, you know.” (Yoko always said “you know.”)
It was, thankfully, a beautiful day, late in the fall, and the early afternoon sun came shining through the leaves. Don Lenzer set the camera, and 1 spoke briefly to John and Yoko, suggesting a path for them to walk along.
John said to me how glad he was to be back, glad to have made a record, glad to be filming again.
“It’s just like Rubber Soul,” he said, “only me face has dropped.” In truth, John looked frailer, almost translucent, as if to prove the stories about the ravages of the lost weekend were true.
In the park, the shooting took about half an hour. John and Yoko would walk up a slight hill, appearing over the crest. Passers-by, noticing the camera, would turn and look, always recognizing John. When we had covered them from several angles, the crew packed up and left to go downtown. I stayed with John and Yoko. We climbed into their limousine. With Thanksgiving weekend upon us, the traffic crawled, threatening to seize up at any moment into impenetrable New York gridlock. The driver headed to the West Side Highway, trying to find an opening, but it was jammed, and we crawled downtown.
John and I talked. He spoke about films, and about how he’d seen a certain shot that he’d liked. “It was like it opened as an aerial shot and then closed in on this train, until, at the end, it was right close up on the headlight on the front of the train.” “Those are great. They take a long time to do, though,” I said, rather defensively. As John spoke, he grew more animated. Yoko sat huddled in a corner, looking out the window. As John grew more excited, Yoko seemed to grow subtly concerned, or so it appeared to me.
I spoke to John about possibly singing some portion of “Woman,” even if it had to be lip-synch. It was something I had mentioned to Yoko on the very first phone call from Los Angeles, trying to persuade her that John singing was interesting. I’d rather see John performing than just walking in the park, or getting in and out of bed. Or — rather — I was glad to see John walking in the park or getting in and out of bed, but I wanted to sec him perform, too. But the idea never seemed to get picked up.
“I dunno,” he said. “I like Yoko’s idea. 1 don’t want to be like Mick, you know, prancing about at forty.” And it wasn’t to be. I couldn’t seem to convince either of them that John singing was interesting, and it was dropped. The limo entered downtown and started through the lower Village. John was gazing out the window. “Look, honey,” he said excitedly. “There’s that building we used to live in.”
(From ETHAN RUSSELL:AN AMERICAN STORY)
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