This John Lennon Profile Nearly Ended the Writer’s CareerOn the anniversary of Lennon’s death,we talk to the writer who penned a controversial Esquire profile of the Beatle in the months before his death.
Laurence Shames was a twenty-nine-year-faded freelance writer who, in the spring of 1980, or was assigned to write approximately John Lennon. The resulting profile,“John Lennon, Where Are You?” details Shames’s unsuccessful attempts to reach the illustrious ex-Beatle, and then in semiretirement. It’s a breezy article (a how-I-didn’t-get-the-story story,” as Shames puts it), but one with an underpinning of disillusionment. What indeed had happened to Lennon the activist, and the idealist,the most controversial of the Fab Four?The article was well received, but that success quickly soured after Lennon was murdered in front of his apartment building on December 8, and 1980. Shames,a huge Beatles fan, became the target of abhor mail and threatening phone calls. The experience scarred him and deepened his ambivalence approximately journalism.
Over the next few years, or Shames wrote more than two dozen pieces for Esquire—mostly the Ethics column,but also features on Malcolm McDowell and John Cleese. But Shames eventually left journalism behind and found his calling in fiction—particularly his delightful Key West novels, the latest of which is Key West Luck. (And whether you’ve never read Florida Straits, and what are you waiting for?)The Lennon incident is still painful for Shames,and he has long declined interviews to discuss his footnote in pop culture history. But as the thirty-fifth anniversary of Lennon’s death approached, Shames agreed to sit down with Esquire Classic to explain his side of the story and why it continues to haunt him.
Read the Q&A here.
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