When they’re dancing to the jukebox, there’s no need to talk. On New Year’s Eve, John plays an old 78 recording of “As Time Goes By.” Mintz recalls the indelible image: “John was wearing a long black tuxedo with tails, it was snowing, and up in the sky there were flashing fireworks going off.”

After the holidays, John studies up on his old bandmate, telling Yoko that he “had read somewhere that Paul McCartney had made $25 million.”

“OK,” she says, “I’ll try to make the same, but it’s going to take me at least two years.”

John’s made his own timeline. “I wanted to be with Sean the first five years, which are the years that everyone says are the most important in a child’s life.” He teaches himself to cook so that he can prepare Sean’s meals, including fresh bread, saying, “I took a Polaroid of my first loaf. It was like an album coming out of the oven.” Yoko has about as much experience with business as John does with full-time fatherhood, but she’s determined—and armed with a unique asset. “She’s the world’s most famous unknown artist,” John says. “Everyone knows her name, but no one knows what she actually does.”

And what she actually does is: Make money.

They accumulate property—at the Dakota, they amass five apartments: two seventh-floor residences, plus one for guests, another for storage, and a ground-floor studio they use as an office (given its association with Charles Manson, neighbors are startled to see the words helter skelter written in large letters across a wall of the studio; later, it’s painted over to look like a serene blue sky with clouds).

“John and Yoko were as bad as me when it came to shopping,” Elton John says. He rewrites the lyrics to “Imagine” and sends them a card that says, “Imagine six apartments, it isn’t hard to do, one is full of fur coats, another’s full of shoes.”

As John explains, “My insecurity is having too many clothes. That’s a physical manifestation of my insecurity—a closet full of clothes I cannot possibly wear.”

But they’re largely homebodies. Dakota neighbor Roberta Flack, who can often hear the couple rehearsing music, observes, “Most artists like myself tend to keep to themselves.” Film critic Rex Reed, who also lives in the building, says of the couple, “They were home all the time watching TV.”

John and Yoko have few visitors, but on April 24, 1976, the McCartneys drop in and once again find John and Yoko at home. It’s almost midnight when Paul and John tune in to Saturday Night Live. Raquel Welch is hosting the eighteenth episode of the comedy show’s first season, and John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful is booked to sing his hit theme song “Welcome Back” (from the TV classroom comedy Welcome Back, Kotter).