September 24, 2017 • 17 mins
After shooting the rock star John Lennon in front of the Dakota Building in Manhattan on December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman remained at the crime scene reading his favorite book, The Catcher in the Rye, until police arrived. Chapman identified powerfully with Holden Caulfield, the novel’s alienated protagonist, and in this episode we explore Chapman’s motivations, their grounding in Catcher, and ask the question: What makes someone kill their own hero in cold blood?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Why media productions. Remember this is just a football game.
Come out of who wins, aw loses? An unspeakable tragedy.
John Lennon, shot twice in the back, rushed the Roseveld hospital,
dead on arrival. The death of a man who sang
(00:22):
and played the guitar overshadows the news from Poland around
in Washington tonight. John Lennon is dead. Don't let it
kept mark. David Chapman was a nobody until he was
on every channel. It was December eight, a chilly winter
(00:44):
evening on Manhattan's Upper west Side. Chapman wore a fur hat,
a silk scarf, and a black three quarter lights coat.
He stood on the sidewalk, arms extended holding a Charter
Arms thirty eight caliber handgun. He squeezed the trigger again
and again. He fired five hollow point bullets, and his
(01:04):
childhood hero, John Lennon. The Assistant District Attorney said, Chapman
committed a deliberate, premeditated execution of John Lennon in a cool, calm,
calculated manner. His attacker made no attempt to flee. He
was arrested at the Dakota Police say he is marked.
David Chapman The reports are that he starts reading this
(01:26):
novel as the chaos erupts around him. So the police
cars arrived, people point out, this is the gunman right here.
He's standing there reading this novel. It's bizarre. The strangeness
of the acts stood out to everyone at the time,
from the police, to the media, to even Chapman himself.
Years later, he described the scene in an interview with
(01:48):
Larry King and then afterwards, it was like the film
strip broke. Took the Catch in the Ryo out of
my pocket. I paced, I tried to read it. I
I just couldn't wait, Larry, until those police got there.
I was just devastated. The police put Chapman in the
backseat of a patrol car. He gazed out the window
(02:10):
and saw officers place a blood soaked body into another car.
There wasn't time to call an ambulance. John Lennon was
pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. The two police
officers who drove Chapman from the scene turned to look
back at the killer. Chapman smiled and said, I am
the catcher and the rye. I'm Sean Braswell, and this
(02:43):
is the thread. A podcast from AZSI media where we
examine the interlocking lives and events of history. We turned
back the clock, one story at a time to reveal
how various strands are woven together to create a historic figure,
big idea, or an unthinkable tread j D. This season,
we start with the death of rock star John Lennon
(03:06):
and over the course of five episodes, actually connected back
to communist leader Vladimir Lenin. Along the way, we meet
some of the twentieth centuries greatest artists and writers. We
explore how each of their stories hinge on the past
and influence the future. People are trapped in history, and
(03:26):
history is trapped in them. That's what the writer James
Baldwin once said. Mark David Chapman may have pulled the trigger,
but trapped in history. Lenin and his death are forever
linked with the classic American novel and Chapman's possession that
December Day, The Catcher and the Rye. What on earth
would make someone kill their own hero in cold blood?
(03:48):
Why did Chapman pull the trigger? Trying to understand what
motivated the guy, what took him there? Why he spent
three days in New York. Tim Riley is a professor
of journalism at Emerson College, a music historian and the
author or of Lenin The Man, The Myth, the Music.
And I've meditated on this for years. I don't feel
like I've ever gotten a good understanding of what's going
(04:08):
on there. Let's pick up the thread at the beginning.
Is a turbulent year for the United States. Fifty two
American citizens are held hostage in Iran for over a year.
The US boycott's the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Back home,
Ronald Reagan, a former actor and California governor, is elected
President of the United States. The year's top film is
(04:29):
The Empire Strikes Back, and a former Beatle living in
New York records his first album in five years. Saturday,
December six, two days before the death of John Lennon,
a heavy set man from Honolulu named Mark David Chapman
arrives at LaGuardia Airport in New York. Chapman brings with
him over two thousand dollars in cash, a handgun, and
(04:52):
five hollow point bullets. He takes a cab to the Dakota,
a famous Gothic style apartment building overlooking Central Park. Some
of the world's most famous people called this home, including
Gilda Radner, Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, and of course John Lennon. Sunday,
(05:13):
December seven, Mark David Chapman spends all day outside the Dakota.
Wasn't uncommon for people to wait at the entrance to
the Dakota because many of celebrities lived there. Lennon typically
would sign a few autographs friends knew where he lived.
The Chapman sees no sign of the rock star that day.
In the evening, Chapman treats himself to an expensive dinner
(05:33):
and an escort at his hotel. The escort happens to
wear a green dress, just like the prostitute who visits
Holden Caulfield, the main character in The Catcher in the
Rye synchronicity, Chapman observes to himself. Monday December eight, Mark
David Chapman wakes up at nine a m. Before leaving
his hotel room, he sets out a strange assortment of
(05:56):
personal items, a bible, his passport, phoe does of himself,
and a small Wizard of Oz poster. Chapman then turns
to look into the mirror, brandishes his firearm and proclaims,
the Catcher in the Rye of my generation. I left
the hotel room, bought a copy of The Catcher in
the Rye, signed it to Holding Caufield from Holding Caufield,
(06:20):
and wrote underneath that this is my statement. Chapman stands
once more by the door of the Dakota with the
other regulars, hoping to catch a glimpse of celebrity. He
peruses his copy of Catcher as he waits. On page
he finds the line it was a Monday in all
and pretty near Christmas, and all the stores were open
(06:42):
a Monday near Christmas. Synchronicity again. Today is the day.
Chapman gets so engrossed in his book that he fails
to notice a taxi pull up. A thin man in
a tan jacket gets out and bounds through the Dakota gate.
It's Lenin. Did you see him, the dorman says to Chapman,
(07:02):
stun Chapman responds, guess I missed my chance. He checks
out Lennon's daily habits. It's clear by now, because he's
there when Lennon leaves in the morning of December eighth,
and he's there when Lennon returns. Chapman sees John Lennon
and Yoko Ono emerged from the Dakota en route to
the recording studio. Chapman walks up to Lennon, his gun
(07:23):
in his coat pocket, and he asked Lenon for his autograph.
A nearby photographer snaps a photo of the moment. Then
Lennon gets into his limo and leaves, and we have
a picture of him signing this kid's album cover of
Double Fantasy. And he signs this album cover, and when
he gets home that night, that same kid is waiting
for him. Around PM, Lennon returns to the Dakota, and
(07:50):
this time Chapman does what he came to do. Chapman
shoots Lennon from behind, and the bullets explode in his chest.
The voice that touched millions is silenced in an instant.
Chapman and Lennon are taken from the Dakota in their
separate patrol cars. Can you imagine how Lennon feels dying
in the back of his cop car. I just I
have a hit album, I've just figured out how to
(08:13):
do this life. I'm finally doing it on my own terms,
and somebody guns me down. So what brought Lennon to
his death the doorstep of the Dakota that night. Let's
rewind Lennon was one of the most famous people on
the planet back in that fame was taking a hard toll,
(08:34):
especially on his first marriage to Cynthia and their young
son Julian. There are periods where the only thing that
is going well in Lennon's life are the the kinds
of songs that are tumbling out of him. It's kind
of unbelievable to see what's going on in his life,
failing marriage, failing as a father, feeling guilty, having lots
(08:55):
of affairs, taking lots of drugs, really not a happy person.
Then yet turning out some incredible songs. But then it
got to be format. This is Lennon reflecting on this
period in his life in an interview with Archao Radio
only hours before his death. It would be his last
and sort of not the pleasure that it was. And
(09:16):
that's when I felt that I had lost myself, not
that I was on purpose purposely being a hypocrite or
phony phony. It's a word strewn throughout The Catcher in
the Rye. The main character hates phonies, the hypocrites and fakes.
That he sees everywhere. Little did Lennon know that being
labeled a phony would get him killed. But more on
(09:38):
that later. John and Yoko get married and moved to
New York. In the first few years of their marriage
were rough. Lennon battled depression, drug addiction, and other demons.
In Lennon decided to take a break from music to
focus on raising his new son, Sean. Lennon forged a
(10:00):
life for himself outside of celebrity, and he felt free
in the streets of New York. He feels like New
York has a different attitude towards celebrities. He feels as
though he's able to walk the streets without being accosted
and without drawing a crowd. New Yorkers always considered themselves
way too cool to be star struck. You don't want
to know how great that is. I mean, people come
(10:21):
up to the aft board to grab or say hi,
but they won't bug you. By nineteen eighty, after five
years as a stay at home dad, Lennon was ready
for his comeback. The world closely followed his return to
the recording studio. It was a very fruitful period. Songs
poured out of lenin about fatherhood, redemption, and his new
(10:41):
stage of life. He released the album Double Fantasy with
Yoko in November. The album had just reached number one
in the UK the week he died up next Why Catcher?
Why did a book like that speaks so much to
someone like Chapman. We'll be back in a moment. While
(11:04):
Lennon's life was coming together, Mark David Chapman's life was
falling apart. As a teenager in Georgia, he went from
being a burned out druggie to an obsessively devout Christian.
He often heard voices, and he was a loan or
a quiet type person. Maybe a little bit of instability there,
so I could I could deceive how it could happen,
you know. Chapman moved to Hawaii in nineteen seventy six,
(11:25):
where he planned to end his life with what he
called a last fling in Paradise. He attempted suicide and failed.
Chapman was later diagnosed with a variety of psychological disorders,
from schizophrenia to narcissistic personality disorder. There was never any consensus.
Chapman rediscovered a book from his childhood, The Catcher in
(11:46):
the Rye at a local library in Hawaii. Month after
month he poured through its pages. Chapman would explain later,
I actually became holding Caulfield in my own mind as
a way of coping. By the way, case you haven't
read it, The Catcher in the Rye is about a
teenager Holden Caulfield, coping with the death of his brother
(12:06):
and the few days he spends in New York before
checking himself into a sanitarium. Holden fantasizes about catching children
who are running through a field of rye before they
fall off a cliff, saving their lives. Mark David Chapman's
fantasy was much different. On one fateful day in early nine,
Chapman picked up another book at the library, a recent
(12:29):
Linen biography called One Day at a Time by Andrew Fawcett.
Inside there was a photo of the rock star on
the roof of the Dakota. Chapman, again, in his interview
with Larry King, remember, I'm in a different state of mind,
and I'm and I'm falling in on myself. I'm angry
at seeing him on the Dakota, and I say to myself,
(12:51):
that phony that bastard Chapman heard the hypocrisy and his
heroes singing Imagine No Possessions. While he lived a charmed
life on New York's Upper West Side, he got angrier
and even more delusional. One day, as he was sitting
cross legged on the carpet of his Honolulu apartment listening
to the Beatles, he had a disturbing epiphany. Holden Caulfield
(13:15):
fantasized about killing a phony and The Catcher in the Rye,
but Chapman was determined to do better. He bought a
gun and after that. Chapman later explained there was no
power on earth that would have saved John Lennon's life.
(13:37):
Holding Caulfield, the main character in The Catcher in the Rye,
has violent fantasies of killing phonies, like this one passage
where Holding wanders through the halls of his Little Sisters
Elementary school and he sees a graffiti view scrolled across
the wall. I kept wanting to kill whoever written it.
I figured it was some perverty bum that sneaked into
the school late at night to take a leak or
(13:58):
something and then wrote it on the all. I kept
picturing myself catching him at it, and how I'd smashed
his head on the stone steps till he was good
and goddamn dead and bloody. After Lennon's murder, Catcher in
the Rye kept turning up at crime scenes. A copy
was found in John Hinckley Jr. Hotel room after he
attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan, and in nine Robert John
(14:19):
Bardo had a copy of it on him when he
murdered the actress Rebecca Schaefer. This is Ken Slowinski, author
of J. D. Salinger Alife. So the country I did
throughout the eighties become the symbol of not just only
disuspected youth, which is what it had been for years
before that, but it's crazy disuffected youth. Lennon himself would
(14:41):
have been perplexed by the connection between his death and
The Catcher and the Rye, says Tim Riley. He was
a big reader of Sallenger Catching the Rye. He loved
that book. We have it on record that he gobbled
it down and that he really loved it. And Riley
claims it helped ignite the era of Beatlemania. John Lennon
and his crowd they were avid rock and roll fans,
but they also saw these other sparks of subversive energy
(15:04):
and other areas of pop culture. And you know it
can't be any accident that Salinger is writing that in
his character for Capturing the Rye at the same time
that rock and roll begins to explode, and you can
see why, Oh yeah, Lennon would definitely respond to that
book in that character holding Caufield is in a lot
(15:25):
of ways, he's like a mentor to John Lennon. Our
series begins at the end of a long timeline at
the gates of the Dakota for death because I don't
believe in it. I think it's just getting out of
wrong call and get into another. Lennon famously said this
(15:45):
in a nineteen interview, And in a way, this is
how our thread works. People get in and out of cars,
travel briefly in each other's lives, and the consequences echo
throughout history. We trace our thread backwards through the blood
soaked beaches in Normandy and the streets of revolution in Russia,
(16:06):
through grimy back room bars and glamorous nightclubs. Join us
as we traveled through nearly a century of history and
find out how it all connects. Next episode, we pick
up the thread with J. D. Salinger. If The Catcher
in the Rye resonates with people in dark psychological places,
it's probably because the novel and its author passed through
(16:29):
Hell itself on the way to publication. The Threat is
produced by Meredith hot Nutt, Libby Coleman, and me Sean braswell.
Our editors are Carlos Watson and Samir Rao. Meredith hot
Knot engineered our show with mixing and sound design from
James Rowland's and Chris Hoff Special thanks to Cindy carpi In,
(16:52):
David Boyer, Tracy Moran, Seawan Culligan, Daisy Carrington, Sun, Jeeve Tandon,
Jeremy Williams, Cameo, George tim Olsa, Ethan Lindsay and k A. L. W.
Check us out at AUSI dot com, That's o z
y dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. To learn
more about the thread, visit ausy dot com, slash the
(17:12):
thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to
the thread on Apple Podcasts. If you love surprising, engaging
stories from history like this one, look no further than
the flashback section of AZZI. Thanks for listening,
Why media productions. Remember this is just a football game.
Come out of who wins, aw loses? An unspeakable tragedy.
John Lennon, shot twice in the back, rushed the Roseveld hospital,
dead on arrival. The death of a man who sang
(00:22):
and played the guitar overshadows the news from Poland around
in Washington tonight. John Lennon is dead. Don't let it
kept mark. David Chapman was a nobody until he was
on every channel. It was December eight, a chilly winter
(00:44):
evening on Manhattan's Upper west Side. Chapman wore a fur hat,
a silk scarf, and a black three quarter lights coat.
He stood on the sidewalk, arms extended holding a Charter
Arms thirty eight caliber handgun. He squeezed the trigger again
and again. He fired five hollow point bullets, and his
(01:04):
childhood hero, John Lennon. The Assistant District Attorney said, Chapman
committed a deliberate, premeditated execution of John Lennon in a cool, calm,
calculated manner. His attacker made no attempt to flee. He
was arrested at the Dakota Police say he is marked.
David Chapman The reports are that he starts reading this
(01:26):
novel as the chaos erupts around him. So the police
cars arrived, people point out, this is the gunman right here.
He's standing there reading this novel. It's bizarre. The strangeness
of the acts stood out to everyone at the time,
from the police, to the media, to even Chapman himself.
Years later, he described the scene in an interview with
(01:48):
Larry King and then afterwards, it was like the film
strip broke. Took the Catch in the Ryo out of
my pocket. I paced, I tried to read it. I
I just couldn't wait, Larry, until those police got there.
I was just devastated. The police put Chapman in the
backseat of a patrol car. He gazed out the window
(02:10):
and saw officers place a blood soaked body into another car.
There wasn't time to call an ambulance. John Lennon was
pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. The two police
officers who drove Chapman from the scene turned to look
back at the killer. Chapman smiled and said, I am
the catcher and the rye. I'm Sean Braswell, and this
(02:43):
is the thread. A podcast from AZSI media where we
examine the interlocking lives and events of history. We turned
back the clock, one story at a time to reveal
how various strands are woven together to create a historic figure,
big idea, or an unthinkable tread j D. This season,
we start with the death of rock star John Lennon
(03:06):
and over the course of five episodes, actually connected back
to communist leader Vladimir Lenin. Along the way, we meet
some of the twentieth centuries greatest artists and writers. We
explore how each of their stories hinge on the past
and influence the future. People are trapped in history, and
(03:26):
history is trapped in them. That's what the writer James
Baldwin once said. Mark David Chapman may have pulled the trigger,
but trapped in history. Lenin and his death are forever
linked with the classic American novel and Chapman's possession that
December Day, The Catcher and the Rye. What on earth
would make someone kill their own hero in cold blood?
(03:48):
Why did Chapman pull the trigger? Trying to understand what
motivated the guy, what took him there? Why he spent
three days in New York. Tim Riley is a professor
of journalism at Emerson College, a music historian and the
author or of Lenin The Man, The Myth, the Music.
And I've meditated on this for years. I don't feel
like I've ever gotten a good understanding of what's going
(04:08):
on there. Let's pick up the thread at the beginning.
Is a turbulent year for the United States. Fifty two
American citizens are held hostage in Iran for over a year.
The US boycott's the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Back home,
Ronald Reagan, a former actor and California governor, is elected
President of the United States. The year's top film is
(04:29):
The Empire Strikes Back, and a former Beatle living in
New York records his first album in five years. Saturday,
December six, two days before the death of John Lennon,
a heavy set man from Honolulu named Mark David Chapman
arrives at LaGuardia Airport in New York. Chapman brings with
him over two thousand dollars in cash, a handgun, and
(04:52):
five hollow point bullets. He takes a cab to the Dakota,
a famous Gothic style apartment building overlooking Central Park. Some
of the world's most famous people called this home, including
Gilda Radner, Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, and of course John Lennon. Sunday,
(05:13):
December seven, Mark David Chapman spends all day outside the Dakota.
Wasn't uncommon for people to wait at the entrance to
the Dakota because many of celebrities lived there. Lennon typically
would sign a few autographs friends knew where he lived.
The Chapman sees no sign of the rock star that day.
In the evening, Chapman treats himself to an expensive dinner
(05:33):
and an escort at his hotel. The escort happens to
wear a green dress, just like the prostitute who visits
Holden Caulfield, the main character in The Catcher in the
Rye synchronicity, Chapman observes to himself. Monday December eight, Mark
David Chapman wakes up at nine a m. Before leaving
his hotel room, he sets out a strange assortment of
(05:56):
personal items, a bible, his passport, phoe does of himself,
and a small Wizard of Oz poster. Chapman then turns
to look into the mirror, brandishes his firearm and proclaims,
the Catcher in the Rye of my generation. I left
the hotel room, bought a copy of The Catcher in
the Rye, signed it to Holding Caufield from Holding Caufield,
(06:20):
and wrote underneath that this is my statement. Chapman stands
once more by the door of the Dakota with the
other regulars, hoping to catch a glimpse of celebrity. He
peruses his copy of Catcher as he waits. On page
he finds the line it was a Monday in all
and pretty near Christmas, and all the stores were open
(06:42):
a Monday near Christmas. Synchronicity again. Today is the day.
Chapman gets so engrossed in his book that he fails
to notice a taxi pull up. A thin man in
a tan jacket gets out and bounds through the Dakota gate.
It's Lenin. Did you see him, the dorman says to Chapman,
(07:02):
stun Chapman responds, guess I missed my chance. He checks
out Lennon's daily habits. It's clear by now, because he's
there when Lennon leaves in the morning of December eighth,
and he's there when Lennon returns. Chapman sees John Lennon
and Yoko Ono emerged from the Dakota en route to
the recording studio. Chapman walks up to Lennon, his gun
(07:23):
in his coat pocket, and he asked Lenon for his autograph.
A nearby photographer snaps a photo of the moment. Then
Lennon gets into his limo and leaves, and we have
a picture of him signing this kid's album cover of
Double Fantasy. And he signs this album cover, and when
he gets home that night, that same kid is waiting
for him. Around PM, Lennon returns to the Dakota, and
(07:50):
this time Chapman does what he came to do. Chapman
shoots Lennon from behind, and the bullets explode in his chest.
The voice that touched millions is silenced in an instant.
Chapman and Lennon are taken from the Dakota in their
separate patrol cars. Can you imagine how Lennon feels dying
in the back of his cop car. I just I
have a hit album, I've just figured out how to
(08:13):
do this life. I'm finally doing it on my own terms,
and somebody guns me down. So what brought Lennon to
his death the doorstep of the Dakota that night. Let's
rewind Lennon was one of the most famous people on
the planet back in that fame was taking a hard toll,
(08:34):
especially on his first marriage to Cynthia and their young
son Julian. There are periods where the only thing that
is going well in Lennon's life are the the kinds
of songs that are tumbling out of him. It's kind
of unbelievable to see what's going on in his life,
failing marriage, failing as a father, feeling guilty, having lots
(08:55):
of affairs, taking lots of drugs, really not a happy person.
Then yet turning out some incredible songs. But then it
got to be format. This is Lennon reflecting on this
period in his life in an interview with Archao Radio
only hours before his death. It would be his last
and sort of not the pleasure that it was. And
(09:16):
that's when I felt that I had lost myself, not
that I was on purpose purposely being a hypocrite or
phony phony. It's a word strewn throughout The Catcher in
the Rye. The main character hates phonies, the hypocrites and fakes.
That he sees everywhere. Little did Lennon know that being
labeled a phony would get him killed. But more on
(09:38):
that later. John and Yoko get married and moved to
New York. In the first few years of their marriage
were rough. Lennon battled depression, drug addiction, and other demons.
In Lennon decided to take a break from music to
focus on raising his new son, Sean. Lennon forged a
(10:00):
life for himself outside of celebrity, and he felt free
in the streets of New York. He feels like New
York has a different attitude towards celebrities. He feels as
though he's able to walk the streets without being accosted
and without drawing a crowd. New Yorkers always considered themselves
way too cool to be star struck. You don't want
to know how great that is. I mean, people come
(10:21):
up to the aft board to grab or say hi,
but they won't bug you. By nineteen eighty, after five
years as a stay at home dad, Lennon was ready
for his comeback. The world closely followed his return to
the recording studio. It was a very fruitful period. Songs
poured out of lenin about fatherhood, redemption, and his new
(10:41):
stage of life. He released the album Double Fantasy with
Yoko in November. The album had just reached number one
in the UK the week he died up next Why Catcher?
Why did a book like that speaks so much to
someone like Chapman. We'll be back in a moment. While
(11:04):
Lennon's life was coming together, Mark David Chapman's life was
falling apart. As a teenager in Georgia, he went from
being a burned out druggie to an obsessively devout Christian.
He often heard voices, and he was a loan or
a quiet type person. Maybe a little bit of instability there,
so I could I could deceive how it could happen,
you know. Chapman moved to Hawaii in nineteen seventy six,
(11:25):
where he planned to end his life with what he
called a last fling in Paradise. He attempted suicide and failed.
Chapman was later diagnosed with a variety of psychological disorders,
from schizophrenia to narcissistic personality disorder. There was never any consensus.
Chapman rediscovered a book from his childhood, The Catcher in
(11:46):
the Rye at a local library in Hawaii. Month after
month he poured through its pages. Chapman would explain later,
I actually became holding Caulfield in my own mind as
a way of coping. By the way, case you haven't
read it, The Catcher in the Rye is about a
teenager Holden Caulfield, coping with the death of his brother
(12:06):
and the few days he spends in New York before
checking himself into a sanitarium. Holden fantasizes about catching children
who are running through a field of rye before they
fall off a cliff, saving their lives. Mark David Chapman's
fantasy was much different. On one fateful day in early nine,
Chapman picked up another book at the library, a recent
(12:29):
Linen biography called One Day at a Time by Andrew Fawcett.
Inside there was a photo of the rock star on
the roof of the Dakota. Chapman, again, in his interview
with Larry King, remember, I'm in a different state of mind,
and I'm and I'm falling in on myself. I'm angry
at seeing him on the Dakota, and I say to myself,
(12:51):
that phony that bastard Chapman heard the hypocrisy and his
heroes singing Imagine No Possessions. While he lived a charmed
life on New York's Upper West Side, he got angrier
and even more delusional. One day, as he was sitting
cross legged on the carpet of his Honolulu apartment listening
to the Beatles, he had a disturbing epiphany. Holden Caulfield
(13:15):
fantasized about killing a phony and The Catcher in the Rye,
but Chapman was determined to do better. He bought a
gun and after that. Chapman later explained there was no
power on earth that would have saved John Lennon's life.
(13:37):
Holding Caulfield, the main character in The Catcher in the Rye,
has violent fantasies of killing phonies, like this one passage
where Holding wanders through the halls of his Little Sisters
Elementary school and he sees a graffiti view scrolled across
the wall. I kept wanting to kill whoever written it.
I figured it was some perverty bum that sneaked into
the school late at night to take a leak or
(13:58):
something and then wrote it on the all. I kept
picturing myself catching him at it, and how I'd smashed
his head on the stone steps till he was good
and goddamn dead and bloody. After Lennon's murder, Catcher in
the Rye kept turning up at crime scenes. A copy
was found in John Hinckley Jr. Hotel room after he
attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan, and in nine Robert John
(14:19):
Bardo had a copy of it on him when he
murdered the actress Rebecca Schaefer. This is Ken Slowinski, author
of J. D. Salinger Alife. So the country I did
throughout the eighties become the symbol of not just only
disuspected youth, which is what it had been for years
before that, but it's crazy disuffected youth. Lennon himself would
(14:41):
have been perplexed by the connection between his death and
The Catcher and the Rye, says Tim Riley. He was
a big reader of Sallenger Catching the Rye. He loved
that book. We have it on record that he gobbled
it down and that he really loved it. And Riley
claims it helped ignite the era of Beatlemania. John Lennon
and his crowd they were avid rock and roll fans,
but they also saw these other sparks of subversive energy
(15:04):
and other areas of pop culture. And you know it
can't be any accident that Salinger is writing that in
his character for Capturing the Rye at the same time
that rock and roll begins to explode, and you can
see why, Oh yeah, Lennon would definitely respond to that
book in that character holding Caufield is in a lot
(15:25):
of ways, he's like a mentor to John Lennon. Our
series begins at the end of a long timeline at
the gates of the Dakota for death because I don't
believe in it. I think it's just getting out of
wrong call and get into another. Lennon famously said this
(15:45):
in a nineteen interview, And in a way, this is
how our thread works. People get in and out of cars,
travel briefly in each other's lives, and the consequences echo
throughout history. We trace our thread backwards through the blood
soaked beaches in Normandy and the streets of revolution in Russia,
(16:06):
through grimy back room bars and glamorous nightclubs. Join us
as we traveled through nearly a century of history and
find out how it all connects. Next episode, we pick
up the thread with J. D. Salinger. If The Catcher
in the Rye resonates with people in dark psychological places,
it's probably because the novel and its author passed through
(16:29):
Hell itself on the way to publication. The Threat is
produced by Meredith hot Nutt, Libby Coleman, and me Sean braswell.
Our editors are Carlos Watson and Samir Rao. Meredith hot
Knot engineered our show with mixing and sound design from
James Rowland's and Chris Hoff Special thanks to Cindy carpi In,
(16:52):
David Boyer, Tracy Moran, Seawan Culligan, Daisy Carrington, Sun, Jeeve Tandon,
Jeremy Williams, Cameo, George tim Olsa, Ethan Lindsay and k A. L. W.
Check us out at AUSI dot com, That's o z
y dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. To learn
more about the thread, visit ausy dot com, slash the
(17:12):
thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to
the thread on Apple Podcasts. If you love surprising, engaging
stories from history like this one, look no further than
the flashback section of AZZI. Thanks for listening,
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