“It was horrendous,” recounts Tom Smothers. “They came in pretty ripped to see our show, and, as Harry later explained to me, he told John, ‘He needs some heckling to make this thing work.’ He didn’t think I had an act. Well, they start heckling, and it was some of the worst language I’ve ever heard—and they had a real buzz on…It was a mess.”

Lawford tries and fails to intervene, then John gets into a scuffle with a local photographer, who claims he hit her.

“Don’t you know who I am?” he shouts to the parking attendant when he’s hauled out of the club. “I’m Ed Sullivan!”

Waking up full of regret, with the story splashed across the tabloids, John sends a bouquet of flowers to Tommy and Dick Smothers, along with an apology: “With Love & Tears!”

In New York, Yoko has even less to say to the reporters who come calling: “No comment!”

In Los Angeles, the district attorney investigates the events surrounding John’s highly publicized night at the Troubadour. Though there is insufficient evidence to justify criminal charges, with his visa still in limbo, he settles out of court with the photographer who’s accused him. “I had to pay her off,” John says, “because I thought it would harm my immigration.”

*  *  *

At Burbank Studios, John is dealing with a different kind of damage. With Phil Spector still on the lam, John is instead producing his friend Harry Nilsson’s album Pussy Cats. But in the midst of the first recording session, it’s clear that Harry’s famously gorgeous voice is shot. Drummer Jim Keltner recalls him saying that he and John had been out “doing a lot of screaming the night before, which John is really good at.”

“Where is all that yooooooo-deeeee-dooooo-dahh stuff?” John asks.

“Croak” is all Harry Nilsson can manage.

John suggests they wrap it up and get back home for the night.

“Home” is a clubhouse of sorts—for months after arriving in LA, John and May hotel- and house-hopped around town, but now they’ve landed a Santa Monica beach house large enough to accommodate a good portion of John’s fellow Hollywood Vampires. At his suggestion, in an effort to avoid the kinds of troubles that beset the earlier recording sessions with Phil Spector, half the people playing on the new album are also shacked up together.

John’s old friend Klaus Voormann has joined them. So has the always outrageous Keith Moon. And Ringo Starr, along with his business manager, Hilary Gerrard, is there to both help his friends and escape his own marital troubles (George Harrison has confessed that he and Ringo’s wife, Maureen, are having an affair. A distraught Ringo leaves Tittenhurst, which he’s recently bought from John, and heads to see his friends in LA).