The lines roll off his pen. He makes a demo on a portable tape recorder.

On holiday in Spain with Ringo and Maureen, Cyn and John quarrel over his drug use. “John was still searching,” Cynthia Lennon will later write, “whereas I thought I had found what I wanted out of life.”

In his final on-screen moments in How I Won the War, John plays a death scene, speaking the line, “I knew it would end this way.” He then addresses the audience directly: “You knew it would end this way, too, didn’t you?” (When the film is released, in October of 1967, reviews are lackluster, but critics can’t deny that the images of a dying Lennon hold profound emotional impact. And perhaps most influential: the round “granny glasses” his character wears, which John makes part of his personal style forever after.)

With the lyrics for what would become “Strawberry Fields Forever” spinning around in his head, John returns home from Spain. In a departure from his usual inclination to write quickly, he continues to work on the song.

*  *  *

In the local newspaper, John reads an article describing a 1966 black-and-white movie directed by a Japanese avant-garde artist named Yoko Ono, a member of the interdisciplinary, experimental global artists collective called Fluxus. The five-and-a-half-minute Four (Fluxfilm no. 16), now archived in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is described by Fluxus founder George Maciunas as “sequences of buttock moment as various performers walked. Filmed at constant distance.”

John laughs but is secretly intrigued by the artist’s brashness and honesty.

So when John Dunbar (married to musician Marianne Faithfull, who in 1966 began a highly publicized romance with Mick Jagger), co-owner of a year-old Mayfair gallery called Indica, invites John to the November 8 opening of Ono’s Unfinished Paintings and Objects, the Beatle shows up a day early, while she’s still installing the exhibition.

Yoko Ono is wearing a black sweater and black pants to match her long black hair, which is combed straight down around a center part.

“Never bring anybody until it’s all ready,” she chides Dunbar. She seems furious—until she takes a look at John, who says, “Maybe I should follow you and see what you’re doing.”

“He was shaved—and he was wearing a suit,” she later recalls. “Up to then, English men had all looked kind of weedy to me. This was the first sexy one I met.”

Yoko is seven years older than John and married to her second husband, an American artist. They have a daughter, Kyoko, the same age as Julian.

“Well,” John says, “what’s the event?”

She hands him a little card. He opens it and sees a single word:

Breathe.

“You mean, like, exhale?” he asks with an exaggerated pant.

“That’s it. You’ve got it,” she replies with a smile.