Books: Challenging The Myth Machine: THE LIVES OF JOHN LENNON

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The tidal wave of grief that followed the murder of John Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980, flowed from several sources. Perhaps the most gaping of these was the shocking obliteration of a decade's worth of hope. Millions awoke one morning bleak with the promise of winter to learn that now the Beatles could never get back together, that the expansive spirit of the '60s had definitively expired ten years past its prime.

But there were other, more pertinent reasons for mourning Lennon's passing. He was not simply the megastar founder of a legendary rock group but a demonstrably troubled man who seemed to be in the process of beating back his demons. After five years of mysterious silence, he had released a new album, Double Fantasy, on which he and his wife Yoko Ono alternately performed love songs. Suddenly Lennon was dominating the airwaves again with his hit single from the album, Starting Over. And he was talking to reporters, telling interviewers about his life as a househusband, baking bread and caring for his and Yoko's young son Sean. That he should be cut down at the beginning of this new flowering, two months after his 40th birthday, just when he was starting over, seemed an intolerable irony.

It still does, of course; nothing can change the harsh reality of Lennon's death. But Albert Goldman's controversial new biography offers unsettling evidence of how thoroughly John and Yoko distorted the messy details of their lives for public consumption. Apparently the mythmaking machinery was working overtime during the fall of 1980. For one thing, the much heralded marriage was on the rocks and headed for worse. Yoko told a confidant of her plans to divorce her husband after the work on Double Fantasy was completed: "I need to free myself of the Lennon name." Her tender contributions to that album were inspired not by John, as everyone was led to believe, but by a man named Sam Green, her lover of the moment. And Lennon's tales of cozy domesticity in the Dakota, his Manhattan apartment house, did not stand up to Goldman's six years of research and interviews; servants handled the baking and child minding while John either nodded off or padded about the place naked and drugged to his eyeballs.

Goldman deserves considerable credit for making such sordid, depressing material compulsively readable. The Lives of John Lennon is a far more balanced and objective biography than his Elvis (1981). Goldman, a pop-culture maven and former professor of English at Columbia University, had no sympathy for Presley or for the gospel, country and rockabilly traditions that fused in his music. Much of Elvis crouches at the level of a self-conscious hipster poking fun at a greaseball bumpkin.