“After John finished Imagine he and Yoko remained in New York City. They would get up anywhere between 10am and 4 PM. When the awoke they called for their “medicine” - little white pills that they wash down with orange juice. When I asked him John told me he was taking methadone.
John was a man of great energy and intensity but when he didn’t have a project to occupy his attention he became lazy and could spend all day in bed watching television. Yoko however was a nonstop worker. She was always spinning off ideas for new projects of her own. To do her work Yoko needed John; it was his money that was being spent so when John refuse to work she could not work. John had an extremely busy mind. When he was idle, his mind could run riot and his nervousness and paranoia would rise to the surface. It was at these moments especially that he turned to Yoko.
Yoko was an extremist and was even more intense than John taking any idea or comment of his to the limit. If, for example, he complained about any of his fellow Beatles she would hint that that Beatle had always been an enemy implying that John should never deal with that person again. Her extreme positions fascinated John and help him take his mind off himself but when she became self-involved and paranoid herself -her paranoia usually dealt with her career, her fame and the fact that even though she had always been famous everyone conspired to keep her from getting even more famous- he had no place to turn. His insecurity about his solo career, his childhood, his relationships with the other Beatles, the way the public perceived Yoko overwhelmed him and he became more and more involved with drugs.
Soon they were both locked into escalating paranoia; the world was against them, no one could be trusted. John had taken to his bed to relax and bed became a cave in which to hide. Only when John was alone in bed with Yoko did he think he might be safe. They both became so fearful that if they left their hotel room and saw someone in the corridor they would back into the room and hide until the corridor was empty.
I watched from a distance as John and Yoko transformed themselves into paranoid victims. In the short time I had known them I had seen them play a number of roles: John had been a devoted, loving, supportive husband; a brilliantly capable professional musician and then a paranoid victim. Yoko had been an aggressive conceptual artist; then a meek, shy wife and then she too had transformed herself into the role of a victim. They both obviously had many gears in their personalities and they could switch back and forth at random. They were like actors who can take on any number of parts and play each other one with so much conviction that they become trapped by the rules they choose to play.
Once they took to bed the only thing that usually got them out of it was a shopping trip.”
- May Pang, Loving John (1984)
