SECOND PART OF THE INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT ROSEN PART 2

SECOND PART OF THE INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT ROSEN PART 2

There are many Spanish readers who have read a book written by one of Lennon’s assistants, a Spanish woman called Rosaura López, who worked for the Lennons for quite a few years at the Dakota. Did you get to know her?

I never met Rosaura López. I wasn’t aware of her until her book was published.

One of the things I considered most interesting about your book was the way you gave importance to the oracles, numerology and horoscopes in the lives of John and Yoko. Did they pay so much attention to them in their daily lives?

John and Yoko had a full-time tarot card reader and seer on staff. His real name was John Green, but they called him Charlie Swan or the Oracle. Swan was on 24-hour call and he did dozens of readings every day for both of them. They asked him what contracts to sign, whom to hire and fire, what art, antiques, and houses to buy, where, when, and how to travel, how to handle their relationship with the McCartneys, etc. Ono traveled to Colombia with Swan to study with a bruja who supposedly taught her how to cast magic spells. (Swan implies in his book, Dakota Days, that during that trip Ono tried to sell her soul to the devil.)
John and Yoko also consulted astrologers and numerologists on a regular basis, and they were big believers in Cheiro’s Book of Numbers. So I’d say yes, the occult was a huge part of their lives, and for that reason it’s a big part of my book. 

The book starts with a “Fantasy” about Jerusalem. I have read your book 3 or 4 times and I have always thought whether there was some truth in that story, because many of us think of John as an eccentric character. In case it was mere fantasy, what meaning does it have in the context of the whole book?
In the Jerusalem fantasy, Lennon is in the Old City of Jerusalem, walking in the footsteps of Jesus. He takes a cab to Gethsemane, “the garden of Jesus’ agony.” He’s thinking about Jews, Germans, Arabs, crucifixion, sin, the Bible, prayer, smoking hash, sex. This chapter is a synthesis of many of the big philosophical ideas that were important to Lennon—things he often thought about, sung about, and wrote about. I used a fictional technique to quickly establish Lennon’s character at the beginning of the story.


After lending your diaries to Yoko, she kept them for many years. Have you gotten them back? What’s your relationship with Yoko at the moment?
Yoko kept my diaries for 18 years and returned them to me just as the first edition of Nowhere Man was going to press. In 1982, after Fred ripped me off and I went public with my story, I met with Ono at the Dakota. She said she wanted to read my diaries because she wanted to know everything that had been going on and because there were things in my diaries that not even I could understand. Since I’d read John’s diaries, I thought it was only fair that she read mine. I gave her 16 volumes of my diaries, covering four years and containing about a half-million words. I think she kept them to punish me for reading John’s diaries, which she claims she didn’t even know existed until I told her about them.
The last time I had anything to do with Yoko was at Fred’s copyright infringement trial in 2002. Ono’s lawyers asked me to testify on her behalf. I did and she won. I felt I owed this to her and to John. Now, I have no real relationship with Ono, though I’m sure when she needs me again her lawyers will call my lawyers.


I understand your book was translated to many languages, but the Spanish one has some mistakes. Since the blog is mainly read by Spanish Beatle fans, what would you like to say about this? The first Spanish edition of Nowhere Man was published in Mexico in March 2003, and the critical reception it received there was miraculous. For the first few months, virtually every day there was something new in the media—stuff on TV, long articles, critiques, and excerpts in all the major newspapers and magazines. Writers like Roberto Ponce at Proceso were calling me for interviews. It just kept going on and on. When I finally went to Mexico City in October 2003, just before the release of the second Spanish edition in Europe and South America, I felt as if I’d entered an alternate universe where everything I’d been working for had come to pass. The media treated me as if I’d written Harry Potter. And this frenzy continued through 2004 and 2005, in Chile, where I also went (thanks to Paniko and Javier Foxon), in Colombia, and to a much smaller degree in Argentina and Spain—though I loved a piece about the book called “El escorpión y el fuego” (“The Scorpion and the Fire”) that Luis Antonio De Villena wrote for El Mundo.

So, I’m forever grateful to my Spanish translator, René Portas, for making all this possible. In fact, I was so overwhelmed by the Spanish reaction that I’ve been trying to learn Spanish. And one of the things I did to study the language was read Nowhere Man in Spanish. So, yes, it’s true, I found some mistakes, and I know that some reviewers in Spain were very critical of the Latin American-style translation. But I’m sure there are mistakes in every book that’s translated. That’s just the nature of translation. I’m beyond delighted that these foreign editions of Nowhere Man exist. They’ve opened a new world for me.
                                                                                                                                                    ...to be continued...