John Lennon and Yoko Ono temporarily separated in 1973. She told him that she had begun to feel suffocated by their constant togetherness, and asked him to move out. At first, Lennon appeared thrilled. He was single for the first time in his adult life.

John Lennon didn’t seem concerned when Yoko Ono asked him to move out

Amid growing tension in their marriage, Ono told Lennon that she wanted a break. She suggested that he move to Los Angeles to give them some much-needed space. Ono asked the couple’s friend, Elliot Mintz, to keep an eye on her estranged husband. At first, however, Lennon seemed perfectly fine to Mintz.

“For the first few months, John appeared entirely content in Los Angeles — one might even say gleeful,” Mintz wrote in his book We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me. “He seemed to consider his expulsion from the Dakota and banishment to the West Coast as something of a bachelor’s holiday.”

Mintz believed that Lennon was excited to experience what it was like to be single for the first time in his adult life.

“Remember, he was twenty-one when he married Cynthia; he was twenty-eight when he married Yoko. Now, at the cusp of thirty-three, for the first time in his adult life, he didn’t have a wife (or, for that matter, three other partners) who made up his extended family. He was a free man.”

His mood eventually turned darker

Before long, the fun began to wear off. Lennon wanted to go home but Ono, who was communicating with Mintz, wasn’t ready.

“After three or four months in LA, much of his initial enthusiasm had boiled off and his mood was starting to curdle,” Mintz wrote. “He was missing Yoko: he began asking me when I thought she’d be ready for him to come home, a question I could never answer.”

Lennon began spending more and more time at bars with the Hollywood Vampires, a drinking club with members like Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, and Mickey Dolenz.

“He started spending more and more time with [Harry] Nilsson, drinking at the Troubadour till all hours, often shutting the place down.”

His behavior became increasingly destructive as well. He went on drunken rampages and raged at friends. 

John Lennon and Yoko Ono reunited in 1975

After 18 months, Ono welcomed Lennon back home. 

“Well, it’s not a matter of who broke it up. It broke up,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975. “And why did we end up back together? (pompous voice) We ended up together again because it was diplomatically viable … come on. We got back together because we love each other.”

He said that they never stopped loving each other through their period apart.

“[The separation] didn’t work out,” he said. “And the reaction to the breakup was all that madness. I was like a chicken without a head.”

In 1975, they welcomed their only child together, Sean Lennon.