“I can’t believe this is fuckin’ IT,” John explodes, and when other guests encourage him not to lose heart and to throw himself back into organizing, saying that people will listen to him, John shoots back, “Listen to me? Man, where’ve you been? They haven’t been listening to me!”

John’s devastated by the loss, and though Yoko usually monitors his alcohol intake, on that night he gets uncharacteristically drunk and high on cocaine. By the time they arrived at Rubin’s apartment, “John was totally out of his head with drugs and pills and drink because he couldn’t stand the fact that George McGovern lost,” Yoko explains. To the shock of all the party guests—especially his wife—John walks into the room, immediately targets a woman (purportedly Rubin’s girlfriend), and takes her into the bedroom. “She didn’t come on to him at all,” says Yoko. “He just pulled her [up] and went into the next room. And then they were groping and all that, and we were all quiet.”

Someone tries to cover the noise by putting on a Bob Dylan record, to no avail. “We heard it anyway. And everybody had their coats in the next room, where John and this girl are making out, so nobody can go home.”

“It was very embarrassing,” Yoko tells journalist friend Ray Connolly.

An understatement.

The next day John is remorseful, but Yoko needs to take some time to mull over how best to handle his behavior. Meanwhile, they get word that an apartment on the Upper West Side is available at 1 West 72nd Street: the Dakota, the 1884 structure regarded as the city’s first luxury apartment building. They’d noticed and admired the building before, but nothing had been available then. Now the seventh-floor apartment across the hall from Roberta Flack is being vacated by actor Robert Ryan after the death of his wife. Its twelve rooms and sweeping views of Central Park immediately captivate the couple.

Most important, the Dakota has guards and robust security in place. While the building is “chockablock full of famous people”—in addition to Flack, other residents include Leonard Bernstein, Rex Reed, and Lauren Bacall—it offers a sense of privacy, too.

That April, John and Yoko pass a stringent co-op board review and move uptown. John happily tells a German reporter, “It is a big apartment, and it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t have grounds…you know, it’s secure.”

*  *  *

Although moving uptown may have eased some of the couple’s concerns, it certainly hasn’t addressed their biggest problems. The episode at Jerry Rubin’s place has been festering.