On whether or not to foreshadow Lennon's death And when he gets to Bermuda, he's had a five-year drought before that, and he writes all of Double Fantasy in about ten days. and then supposedly, singing filthy Liverpool shanties at the top of his lungs, John sailed the boat through the Bermuda Triangle in a storm and saved everyone's life. So John learned how to sail that spring, he bough a sailboat, the Isis, and he sailed out of Cold Spring Harbor, and then he planned this trip through the Bermuda Triangle, from Rhode Island to Bermuda, and along the way, he had a harrowing storm, and the captain, a man named Hank Halsted, turned the boat over to John at one point because everybody else was seasick. If I said anything new about John it's that I think this was the beginning of a prolonged second act in John's life that would have been really fruitful.īut my sense, what I wanted to say, was that John's last year was about being a father, and thinking back on his own father, and about going to sea. And then I discovered that it was really more about this father and son.' But I wanted to write about people who were neighbors of John Lennon in the year before his assassination, that was the first conceit. Father and son pal around Manhattan, and hob-nob with Kennedys, John and Yoko, and other bold-faced names as Buddy Winter tries to figure a way back into the limelight.īarbash says he grew up very near the Dakota, 'and it was always this great, looming, haunted castle.

His father, a late-night talk show host named Buddy Winter, has just walked off his show and into a breakdown. Tom Barbash's new novel tells the story of Anton Winter, who returns to his parents' apartment in the Dakota in 1980, after a spell in the Peace Corps in Africa - and a spell of malaria. The Dakota Winters isn't a novel set on frozen prairies, but in the rarefied precincts of perhaps the most famous apartment house in New York: the Dakota, on the Upper West Side, the place in which luminaries lived - and one of the brightest, John Lennon, also died, shot to death just outside the entrance.

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