Here is John Lennon: thin bare arms, a rumpled T-shirt, bare feet, delicate fingers curled around a brown-papered cigarette, reaching for a cup of steaming coffee. A pale winter sun streams into the seventh-floor apartment in the Dakota, an expensive apartment house that stands like a pile of Nineteenth century memories on the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West. Earlier, the Irish...

It had been a good night. John Lennon had just finished making music with his wife, Yoko Ono, that he regarded as some of the best music of his life, and his judgment wasn't off the mark. He had also learned, just a bit earlier, that his and Ono's album Double Fantasy -- the first collection with new music from Lennon in five years, following a mysterious sabbatical -- had gone gold that day. Now he and Ono were on their...