Elton John and John Lennon had a friendship that the public record has only partially captured. The most visible evidence of it is musical — the 1974 Madison Square Garden concert where Lennon appeared onstage with Elton following through on a bet made in the recording studio, a bet that produced “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” and Lennon’s last live public performance. The footage of that night has been watched millions of times. Lennon onstage looking happy in a way that his public appearances of the previous several years had not always made visible.
What the public record is less complete about is the friendship that existed around and underneath the professional overlap. The conversations. The specific quality of the regard each man had for the other — regard that was complicated, as regard between major artists often is, by the particular tension of two people who are both operating at the highest level and who recognize something in each other that they do not recognize in most of the people around them.
Elton John was in a car when he heard the news on December 8th, 1980. The accounts of his immediate response come from the people who were with him — a response that was not composed and was not performed and was not the public grief of a celebrity processing a colleague’s death. It was the private grief of someone who has lost someone specific. Someone who had been in a room with him and laughed with him and argued about music with him and whose presence in the world had been a specific and irreplaceable thing.
He sat down that night and wrote. Not for publication. Not in the way that public figures write public statements to fulfill the expectation that they will respond visibly to visible events. He wrote the way people write when they need to say something that has nowhere else to go.
He wrote to Yoko. Because Yoko was the person who had been with John in the specific daily sense — who had been in the rooms and in the mornings and in the ordinary texture of the life that was now permanently altered. Who had received the call or heard the news in whatever specific way she heard it and had become, in that moment, the person who would carry this forward alone.
He had the letter delivered by hand. Not mailed. Delivered. The specific choice of a person who understands that some communications require the physical gesture of hand delivery — who understands that leaving a letter at the door of someone’s grief is not the same as sending it through a system.
Yoko Ono received it. She has confirmed in multiple contexts over the years that the letter exists and that she has it. She has described it — without quoting it, without providing the content — as one of the most significant pieces of personal correspondence she has received in forty years of receiving correspondence as the widow of a cultural legend.
She has said that it is honest. That Elton John wrote things in that letter that he had never said publicly and has never said publicly since. Things about John. About what John had been. About what the specific loss of John specifically — not the loss of a Beatle, not the loss of a cultural figure, but the loss of this particular difficult magnificent infuriating brilliant specific man — meant to someone who had known him.
She keeps it. She has kept it for forty years. She has declined every inquiry about its content and will continue declining.
She is right. The letter belongs to the night it was written. It belongs to the grief that produced it. It belongs to the specific private relationship between three people — Elton, John, and Yoko — that no public access serves.
Some things should stay exactly where they are.
This is one of them.