John Lennon's Last Days - An Interview(Charles E.J. Moulton) INTERVIEW WITH MR. WERNER HAAS
ABOUT JOHN LENNON

My friend Uncas Rydén and I were the leading members of a club. It was The B.S.F.C. – The Beatles Special Fan Club. We had stickers, a board of executives, a cashier and a club magazine. Even when I moved to Vienna in 1984, I kept writing articles for the club’s pamphlet that was sold at local parties.
When I found out that our family friend Mr. Werner Haas had been a neighbor of John Lennon’s and experienced his assassination at close range at the time of his death at 10:50 p.m. on December 8th 1980, I realized that this was a scoop I couldn’t miss.
The following interview was held on May 20th 1985 and published in that year’s second issue. It was a warm spring evening and the interview location was the open terrace of the Park Avenue Hotel Restaurant in Vienna, Austria.
This is the conversation as it was recorded on cassette tape that day. This copy is an August 3rd 2011 re-transcription of the original from 1985.
This interview has been lying untouched in the vaults since then.

CM – CHARLES MOULTON
WH – WERNER HAAS

CM –What was your impression of John Lennon by any personal contact?

WH – Well, my contact with him was as a neighbor. When his baby was very, very young, he used to have a harness he’d put him in, to walk in the park. I think the reason he was friendly was that we didn’t talk about anything in particular. I never treated him as John Lennon or felt that he was due any great respect or any ooh’s or aah’s. I think he got tired of everybody just looking at him. I guess it is the price you pay. I think the fact that I just said hello or that we talked about nothing important at all ever, certainly not about The Beatles or about music or anything like that, made him grateful not to have to worry about who he was or who he was pretending to be.

CM – And how did you find his wife, Yoko Ono?

WH – Their love was real and very deep. That much was clear. I think she might’ve been very protective of him. Maybe it was the fact that it was his fame. She was an artist in her own right when they got married. She was still Yoko Ono, albeit Mrs. John Lennon. I think that she was either trying to “protect her turf”, as it were, or merely the fact that she didn’t want to share him with a lot of people, particularly with people she didn’t know or who didn’t know her or who were not her professional peers. When you get to that level of stardom, it is quite understandable.

CM – Did you ever hear John sing in person?

WH – No, no, never did. I had one chance to do it when they performed in New York City and were still The Beatles, but I never went and, of course, now in retrospect I wish I had gone.

CM – But he never talked about his singing or composing or anything like that?

WH – Not to me. And I don’t know if I would really have encouraged him to do that, because I think it would have spoiled a good rapport, just two people who happened to live a few feet apart. And all of a sudden if I had become just another Beatle-worshiper or another celebrity-clown, I think that would’ve destroyed the adult, or whatever, relationship there was. You know: “How are you?”, “Good to see you”, “How’s your son?” I’m not sure if he would’ve remembered my name, although I’d mentioned it to him. It was just one of those things that was purely neighbor-to-neighbor, person-to-person. Not adult-body VS. superstar John Lennon.

CM – How was his son? How did you find his son?

WH – Julian? Or the little one?

CM – No, the little one.

WH – When I knew them he was just a baby, and as all babies do or did, he screamed and wet his pants and did everything fairly normal. I haven’t seen him now, although I know that they still live next-door, but I haven’t seen him. So when I was there, he was just a couple of years old.

CM – The big question: what happened on the day he was shot? How did you react when you heard about what had happened?

WH – Well, I had come home just about ten minutes before. I was out-of-town myself and I had come back late by plane and by taxi from the airport. I went into the apartment and decided to get into the shower. A friend of mine, who was living with me at the time, was watching television and a friend of ours phoned and said, “My God, what’s going on over there?” I was still dripping wet from the shower and said, “What are you talking about?” She had the news on: John Lennon was shot and they rushed him to the hospital. That was the first that I had heard of it. Other people, I guess neighbors of ours, said or at least claimed, to have heard the shots. hen, almost within minutes, people started to gather. I guess he was really dead on arrival at the hospital, so when the news flashed out, by then hundreds of people came and the crowd just grew. The streets were blocked. There were probably thousands of people getting as close as they could. I even sent my friend out with a tape recorder to try to get some on-the-spot interviews. The people were really quite angry about that and said: “How can you commercialize at a time like this?” It wasn’t that, it was just the idea of gathering some off-the-cuff reminders of their impressions. I was going to send them home to Casey Kasem in California. As a matter of fact, the station had phoned me because they knew I lived next door to John and they wanted the recordings for their show the next day on their Los Angeles radio station. Nevertheless, we were really so inundated with people and police that we could not even get out of the apartment building and go to the store. Of course, from where we were, we could look into the side entrance of the Dakota building at all the celebrities that went in and were herded around. We would just look out the window and see Ringo Starr and the other people coming by.

CM – How did you feel about all of this happening around you?

WH – I don’t think it sank in right away. With some people, when something like this happens, you feel an immediate sadness or sense of loss. This took some time. What probably made it finally sink in was the fact that these people of all ages, colors, creeds, whatever, came to pray together. Usually when you have big crowds you have some problems, but these were just very quiet. Some of them had candles. Some of them left flowers at the entrance to the building. It was a very subdued and a very orderly crowd. I don’t know, I think it was probably the only crowd of its type that I have ever seen and it was really that restrained feeling. It was not really sadness, although it was sad and it was not really anger, although there was anger. It was just a situation they didn’t know how to deal with. There were a lot of people who seemed to feel that something like that was coming, that either John or – well, they felt that the whole era of the Beatles was officially dead. You know, they had talked about getting together for one last concert, but then all denied it. There were all these rumors that they hated one another and that the problem with Brian Epstein, the accusations for Paul marrying Linda and John marrying Yoko had escalated. I think now the great shock was that this was the end of an era and that something that people had hoped for would never come again. A group like that probably never existed before and never will exist again. They just changed so many things from hairstyles to clothes to the type of singing to the type of entertainment. The variety of musical talent was endless. It wasn’t just pop music. It was timeless.

CM – When did you first meet Lennon?

WH – I couldn’t tell you the year, but I guess it was just shortly after they moved in. I talked to the man with this little baby and I didn’t know who he was. But to me that wasn’t rare. I spent a half an hour once talking to someone who turned out to be Red Skelton. I walked my dog with somebody who turned out to be Elliot Gould, so I’m not a good celebrity-recognizer, I guess. Just one day I was walking with the dog in the park and along came this guy with a harness and a little baby in it. We started to talk about the dog. He went on his way and I went mine. A friend of mine saw me and he said: “What did you and John Lennon have to talk about?” And that was the first time I knew it was John Lennon.

CM – (laughing) Oh, my God…

WH – You just see all these posters of someone who has changed somewhat and he doesn’t look like you remembered John Lennon from all the album covers and all the publicity stills. He just looked different. Well, I guess the time of the Beatles was over.

CM – Let’s talk about his solo career.

WH – He was writing songs and recording them, but I don’t exactly know what he was releasing at that time. According to rumor, there is still a lot of unreleased stuff. Mrs. Lennon may eventually release it.

CM – Was he a good neighbor? Did you find him a good neighbor?

WH – That’s the wrong thing to ask any New Yorker, because there are no such things in New York. Neighborhoods don’t exist in a big city like New York. Every building is its own neighborhood. He is reputed to have owned six or seven apartments in the Dakota, which is the oldest apartment building in that part of the world. It is also one of the most expensive buildings to live in in New York. All the celebrities live or have lived in it. Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Boris Karloff, when he was alive, Basil Rathbone lived there, a number of well-known writers and actors and musicians. So, it wasn’t really a neighborhood-thing. When you have buildings where you are guarded by X-number of doormen and guards, it isn’t a neighborhood. It’s just a building where people just happen to nod their heads and say: “Isn’t it terrible about so-and-so?” No, there is no such thing as being able to make judgment about anybody possibly being a good neighbor.

CM – What was the reaction in the house to his death?

WH – Well, I think the greatest reaction was the terrible inconvenience of not being able to get through huge crowds and of being asked by police as to why you are here and why you are trying to get across the police barrier. I think particularly the older people in his building and in our building next door were terribly inconvenienced, because they couldn’t get their groceries or the medicines delivered. The pizzas and Chinese food from down on the corner couldn’t come in, because there were just thousands of people there. And then the fact that it went on around the clock. The people were quiet, but when you get three or four thousand people in a small area, you just can’t have complete quiet. Along about 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning it can get a bit disconcerting.

CM – Has popular music changed the last few years? What about since the Beatles split up?

WH – Let me rephrase that by asking you a question. Since you are trying to do something involving what was, why are people’s interests today still in something that was and never can happen again? Why not concentrate a lot of that energy in trying to develop something new and exciting and different and interesting today? I, frankly, find that most of what’s around today is – well, you know, can’t last the way a lot of the Beatles-stuff has lasted. Yet nobody seems to be doing very much about trying to come up with something or get behind or boost a group that has something to say and does it well. When you look at who’s number one and number three and number four, it’s a little frightening, the lack of talent and ingenuity. It’s just a lot of promotion. Who do you like today? Springsteen?

CM – John Lennon.

WH – (Laughs) Of course. Good choice.

CM – And I am the son of opera singers, so it does tend to get classical. Besides that, The Beatles, Elvis, ABBA. If it’s good music, it appeals to me.

WH – One of the interesting things is that a lot of the Beatles’ songs were recorded by other people as well. When I was growing up, whether it was Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, you know, what we call middle-of-the-road-artists, would all record the same songs. If
you liked the one artist better than the other then you bought that version of the song. The Beatles songs were also recorded by many of the greats. (Comment from editor: Sinatra called George Harrison’s Something his favorite love song). Today, usually a number is so closely identified with a particular group or an artist that nobody else records it.

CM – What about Julian Lennon? Did you ever see him when you knew John?

WH – I think he was living in England back then. I’m not sure that he came over or how much contact was there between him and John’s new family. Of course, now Julian is another “promotion-piece”. He sounds like his father, but I don’t really know how extensive his talents are.

CM – How much did John talk about his children, Julian and Sean? I’ve read that John wanted to give Sean a nice childhood and that he looked forward to seeing Sean grow up. That was just a few days before the assassination. That was really tragic. Did you hear anything like that from John?

WH – No, except that he really doted on that child. I would think that 80 % of the time that I saw him, he had the child with him, usually in that harness. He took Sean everywhere, because he was still a baby. During the time Sean was not able to walk very much, he just had him in that harness and took him everywhere. I think it was great thing. Well, the fact that John was rich enough to be able to do it. He didn’t have to leave for the office at 8 o’clock in the morning and be away all day or off on tour for a year or two. He could spend some quality time with the child.

CM – Do you think he ever had the feeling that he would die soon?

WH – I think that anybody in the public eye, I mean particularly after the Kennedy assassination, was afraid. There wasn’t anybody who didn’t have the fear that when you heard a car backfire that it wasn’t gunshot. There is so much violence. It isn’t envy. It’s making the 8 o’clock news, making the headlines. It’s that kind of mentality.

CM – Your closing comments?

WH – Well, I’ve been so much on the periphery that you are getting a lot of conjecture and opinion instead of fact. Basically, I just knew him as a human being and not as John Lennon. I knew him as somebody who lived next door, a human being who was a good father to his son. I didn’t know him as a celebrity, a singer or a Beatle. Basically, this teaches that we are human beings and souls first. Celebrity is only a close second.

CM – Thank you for your time!

WH – You’re welcome! And welcome to New York City!

CM – Thank you!

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