I Met the Walrus_ How One Day With John Lennon Changed My Life Forever - Jerry Levitan [33]
Within twenty-four hours of treating me to an extraordinary day filled with life-altering experiences, John Lennon was unwittingly responsible for setting me up on a date with an Apple recording artist. Mary led me onto the dance floor of the Electric Circus. It was the hippest and newest club in Toronto and had state-of-the-art strobe lights. The place was packed and no one seemed to know that Mary Hopkin was there. I remember feeling goofy dancing to some number, all the while astounded that before me was this beautiful star from across the Atlantic, smiling and swaying to the music. All I could think was, “She knows Paul McCartney.”
We were probably dancing to one of the hits of the time, “Hair” by the Cowsills or the theme from Hawaii Five-O, when the music shifted abruptly to “Goodbye.” The deejay announced that “Apple recording artist Mary Hopkin” was in the room and a spotlight hit us to the applause of everyone there. There I was dancing, sort of, with a pop star.
At some point the evening wound down, and Mary was being led out by the Capitol PR man, back to the limousine. I followed her and witnessed the crush of people who wanted to say hi and touch her. She had to get in the limo fast because of the crowd outside the club but she stopped to say good-bye to me. “Thank you for coming,” she said sweetly and being the real man that I was I kissed her on the cheek. “Good-bye, Mary,” I waved as she sat in the limo and the door closed. The window lowered and she waved back to me and to the fans. “Say hi to Paul,” I shouted as she took off. Then I strutted away fully aware that people were staring at me wondering who the hell I was.
I called CHUM everyday and was told they would call me. But they didn’t. I got into such a fit that one day I showed up at CHUM’s head office and started yelling in the reception area until someone from the news desk came out to talk to me. I was turning purple and causing a scene. “It’s my tape! It’s my tape!” I kept shouting. “I’ll be right back,” he said nervously in front of the other people in the room. About ten minutes later he came back with a box that contained my taped interview. “Here you are.” I took it and ran. When I got home I called my Uncle Mike. He had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and promised to come over in the evening.
We were still having dinner that night when Mike waltzed right into the house and into the kitchen. My mother, my father, Steve, and I sat there at the table watching him set up the tape that I’d given him. He pressed the play button. It was my voice asking a question, a question that was answered by John Lennon. For some twenty-five minutes we sat there. My parents were mystified. Mike kept clapping his hands with enthusiasm. My brother gave me a look of awe. It was the first time I’d impressed him. “Wow, Jerry,” he said softly. “You really did it. You really did it.”
In the days following my meeting with John and Yoko, they spent a week in bed in a Montreal hotel suite. The door was wide open and anyone could get in. That was where he wrote and recorded “Give Peace a Chance,” with Timothy Leary and Tommy Smothers chanting in the great chorus. I watched the news bits—there was no CNN back then—listened to the radio, and read the newspaper accounts of what my hero was up to. I felt