Now that the Beatles Channel is on Sirius 18 as we travel across the universe, I feel closer to spring. Did you know John Lennon and Yoko Ono went house hunting along the coast of Maine once, to try on what we feel?
The Dakota, Central Park, is gorgeous but comparatively claustrophobic. What must it have been like for them to come up here undercover, feeling so much release as the shores of Maine spooled out to infinity in front of them? Yoko was visiting Portland in 2005 when I caught up with her.
How many times have you been to Maine before?
Yoko Ono: “I believe a couple of times, but just once with John. We were driving the coast, so to speak, I think maybe in a station wagon. He fell in love with wherever we went, and now he’d fallen in love with Maine. We talked excitedly in the car. We were looking for a house on the water.”
If John and Yoko had bought a house in Prouts Neck in Scarborough, they’d have had a lot to prove to the locals. Because as I’ve been told recently, the clan out there in Prouts Neck is comprised of “very private people.” Even Google Street View doesn’t dare to go out there because it’s so exclusive with its private roads!
Ever since Yoko told me about this search, I keep hunting for a perfect place for them in my mind. During our interview, Yoko spoke of “time as a great hotel room,” whether it was the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they spent their ‘second bed-in,’ or the Portland Regency, where she was speaking to me at exactly that second, or any other hotels before or since. So it seems appropriate. Because she and John will always be together, what kind of house would they have picked in Maine?
“We talked excitedly in the car. We were looking for a house on the water… We did examine the place! We kept driving north along the water until I don’t really remember the name of the town.* We went quite a ways up, actually, because it was so beautiful.” To Lennon, each place was more beautiful than the last. Ditto for Yoko.
Join Yoko and John. Feel what they felt. Start your search. Ninety-seven percent of our readers say they’re looking for a new or second home right now up here. Did you know a Maine summer resident, the Pulitzer prizewinner Edward Bok of Camden/Rockport, coined the term “living room?”Turn the pages of this March issue of Portland Monthly to sense incredible homes traveling through time, style, memory, and personality. Happy hunting!
*See Portland Monthly’s short story “Lamoine,” by Rick Moody [Summerguide 2006], where he writes of doing the same thing.
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