“Something’s happened to John.” Ringo and his fiancée, Barbara Bach, are in the Bahamas when Barbara’s daughter calls them. Ringo is on hiatus from recording a new album, Stop and Smell the Roses. John had offered Ringo two songs for the album, and was scheduled to join Ringo in the studio in January to record “Nobody Told Me.” (Neither this nor the other John Lennon song, “Life Begins at 40,” winds up on the album.)

*  *  *

“Cyn, I’m so sorry. John’s dead.” Cynthia Lennon happens to be in London, visiting Ringo’s ex-wife, Maureen, when Ringo calls with the awful news.

Cyn immediately thinks of her and John’s seventeen-year-old son, Julian, back home in North Wales. Everyone says he’s the spitting image of his father. And Cyn knows firsthand what it’s like to lose a parent at that age.

It’s barely 6 a.m., so Cyn calls her third husband and asks him to keep the news from Julian until she can make the four-hour drive home.

As soon as Julian wakes, though, and sees all the reporters outside the house, he knows that something terrible has happened to his father.

*  *  *

Ringo charters a private plane and flies with Barbara to New York.

“Don’t run from them, it will just make it more difficult,” advises friend Elliot Mintz as he helps Ringo and Barbara navigate the media swarming the Dakota. But the celebrity photographers don’t miss a face as famous as Ringo’s.

“I want to do what I can to help,” Ringo tells Yoko when they’re inside, away from the glare of the cameras.

“Well, you just play with Sean,” she tells him. “Keep him busy.”

Ringo and Barbara follow the child into his play area, equipped with a trampoline, and spend hours trying to make the little boy smile.

*  *  *

Elton John’s plane touches down in Melbourne, Australia, but he and his entourage are ordered to stay on board. An eerie feeling comes over him immediately.

Someone’s dead.

Elton’s manager climbs out of his seat and heads straight to the cockpit to demand answers. Moments later, he returns crying and relays the tragedy.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Elton John says. “It wasn’t just the fact of this death, it was the brutality of how it happened.”

*  *  *

Hours after learning of his father’s murder, Julian Lennon boards a passenger jet bound for New York.

The press are respectful of the teenager’s grief as he departs, but he is unprepared for the mob scene that greets him at the Dakota, where hundreds of mourners have already started to gather to sing his father’s songs.

—

December 9, 1980

Inside the Twentieth Precinct, Mark reads his copy of The Catcher in the Rye. He is dressed in the same clothes he wore last night, and he still smells pleasantly of gunpowder.

In the early afternoon, he is given a bulletproof vest.