What was John Lennon’s last meal?
There’s a strange, morbid curiosity surrounding a person’s final meal. Forming a macabre ritual for prisoners on death row, the chilling finality of the ultimate dish you’ll ever enjoy perhaps instils a more potent mortal bookend due to its mundanity, a lifelong, everyday activity taken for granted stricken with the grim reality that one of life’s base and humdrum exercises will no longer be experienced.
An extra tragic dimension takes hold when death awaits unbeknownst around the corner. While staying at London’s Samarkand Hotel, Jimi Hendrix tucked into a late-night tuna fish sandwich rustled up by his girlfriend the evening he died. Whitney Houston ordered a hamburger and turkey sandwich with a side of fries, champagne and Heineken. King of Pop Michael Jackson’s final dish was reportedly a humble spinach salad with chicken breasts.
Contrary to popular belief, Elvis Presley’s last meal was four scoops of ice cream and six chocolate chip cookies rather than his signature fried peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich.
However, few music artists’ death is shrouded in such notoriety as John Lennon’s assassination in 1980. Shot execution style outside his Dakota apartment in New York City, an obsession with The Beatles spilt into violence as Mark David Chapman grew incensed with Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comments and perceived hypocrisy between his material comfort and the radical politics he espoused through the 1970s.
Whatever rationale can be gleaned from an episode of violent mental health issues, Chapman hung around Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s Manhatten residence with a .38 revolver and fatally shot him in the back.
After spending his last hours shooting the retrospectively eerie Rolling Stone naked cover with Annie Leibovitz and unwittingly granting his last interview with the RKO Radio Network, Lennon and Ono left their apartment to lay down the final mix for Ono’s ‘Walking on Thin Ice’. Greeting Chapman on the way out, Lennon signed his copy of Double Fantasy before his murder later that night.
“He was very kind to me. Ironically, very kind and was very patient with me. The limousine was waiting … and he took his time with me and he got the pen going and he signed my album,” Chapman revealed at his 2012 parole hearing. “He asked me if I needed anything else. I said, ‘No. No sir.’ And he walked away. Very cordial and decent man.”
And his last meal?
According to James L Dickerson’s Last Suppers: If the World Ended Tomorrow, What Would Be Your Last Meal?, Lennon stopped by a deli for a corned beef sandwich and a cup of tea. It was an unusual choice, as both Lennon and Ono were advocates of vegetarianism, but later in life, he was open about his whole-meal, macrobiotic diet to Playboy in 1980, speaking candidly about his ‘flexitarian’ fancies and even admitting to eating the occasional junk food.
A decent corned beef sandwich from a proper deli, perhaps, is enough to tempt the most principled veggie? It’s a banal choice in a banal moment that illustrates starkly the fleeting nature of mortality and illustrates a common sense of human infallibility.
