They also purchase property in Florida, where John’s experienced bursts of true happiness on his several trips down there over the years. “I really don’t want to leave Palm Beach,” he’d told a local reporter during a visit in 1974. “I’d like to own a piece of it.”

On January 31, 1980, he does, buying a property that, a year earlier, Yoko had toured and rented under the pseudonym Mrs. Green. Here, at the historic twenty-two-room mansion built in 1919 by renowned architect Addison Mizner and known as El Solano, Julian meets his half brother, Sean, for the first time. It’s a doubly special trip for Julian, and John marks (one week early) the occasion of his son’s sixteenth birthday, April 8, 1979, with a family party on a chartered yacht.

Looking out over the ocean in the early morning hours, John says, “Sunrises rejuvenate you. It recharges the batteries!”

*  *  *

“Welcome, my dear!” John says to Yoko.

She’s arrived in early 1980 to spend her first night at their newest property, a three-story Tudor-style home called Cannon Hill on the north shore of Long Island, overlooking Cold Spring Harbor.

As they pour tea and light their morning cigarettes, they agree that they’ve found “a gorgeous place.”

“So different than waking up in New York,” Yoko says.

Studio One, the first-floor office where Yoko keeps busy running Lenono Music and growing their fortune, is where Yoko spends most of her time.

“If I’m lucky, maybe she’ll come up and we’ll do something but she’s a workaholic,” John says. “Sometimes she’ll start again at twelve midnight, ’cause she’s always callin’ the West Coast, or England or Tokyo or some Godforsaken place that’s on a different time zone from us.”

This morning John looks out toward the private beach. “It’s better here than real life—you know, the sea is bluer.”

Chapter 54

Chapter 54

Go Johnny go!

—“Johnny B. Goode”

Twenty-five-year-old Tyler Coneys carries boxes filled with aspiring artists’ demo tapes into the basement of Cannon Hill. He picks up extra cash sometimes by helping John and Yoko around their Cold Spring property. “John and Yoko would send stuff, fan mail, to the house on Long Island for storage,” Coneys says in 2019. “A box came, and on top of the parcel that I was bringing down to the basement was a mocked-up album cover. On the cover was an overweight young guy with dark glasses. His name was Mark Chapman.”

John has recently been a customer at the marina that Coneys’s family owns in nearby Huntington. Coneys has been teaching John basic seamanship, bringing Sean along for the ride. John has a fourteen-foot single-sail boat named Isis after his and Yoko’s passion for Egyptian art. “All my life I’ve been dreaming of having my own boat,” he says. “I can’t wait to learn how to sail!”

They sail past Billy Joel’s home on Cooper’s Bluff, overlooking Oyster Bay.