Robert Rosen is an American writer born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 27, 1952. He is the author of The Final Days of John Lennon, a controversial account of the ex-Beatle's last five years, based on Rosen’s memory of Lennon’s diaries.
Rosen attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. He studied writing at the City College of New York...with Joseph Heller, James Toback, and Francine du Plessix Gray...where he edited Observation Post (OP), one of the student newspapers.
Rosen worked as a freelance journalist and a men's magazine editor at High Society and Swank Publications. Rosen's own erotica was often written under the pen name Bobby Paradise. He was briefly a speechwriter for U.S. Air Force Secretary John L. McLucas and wrote about this experience in two magazine articles.
Rosen's work has also appeared in Uncut, Headpress, La Repubblica, Proceso, Reforma, VSD, El Heraldo, and The Clinic.
During Rosen’s tenure as editor, New York Senator James L. Buckley called for a federal investigation of OP when, according to The New York Times of March 10, 1974, the paper ran a cartoon of a nun “using a cross as a sexual object.” [1] Also in response to the cartoon, a state senator, John Marchi, called for a ban on the use of student activity fees to fund undergraduate newspapers. But the controversy ended on April 17, 1974, when a New York Times editorial defended OP, saying that the Marchi bill was not a “constructive way to inspire faith in civil liberties, or to improve the responsibility or the taste of student editors.” [2]
In 1979, an OP editor posed for a series of photographs that recreated the nun cartoon, and published them in OP. According to the May 24—30, 1979, issue of The Soho Weekly News, these photographs prompted the City University chancellor to publicly apologize to Cardinal Cooke; the Board of Higher Education to demand the criminal prosecution of OP’s editors on obscenity charges; and the student body of City College to vote to eliminate OP’s funding and end the paper’s 32-year run.
In a piece titled “Nun the Worse for Wear” that ran in the same issue of The Soho Weekly News, Rosen, in one of his first experiments with participatory journalism, told the story of the nun from his own point of view: as the editor who originally published the cartoon and as the domestic partner of the editor who posed for the photographs.
According to Nowhere Man, Lennon's diaries were given to Rosen in 1981 by Frederic Seaman, Lennon's personal assistant. Seaman told Rosen that Lennon had given him permission to use the diaries as source material for a biography that Seaman was to write in the event of Lennon’s death. Five days after Lennon's murder, Seaman asked Rosen to help him with the project.
According to Rosen's testimony at Seaman's copyright infringement trial in September 2002...the verdict gave Yoko Ono control of more than 300 photographs Seaman took when he was the Lennons’ employee...Seaman sent Rosen out of town in February 1982 and then ransacked his apartment, taking everything Rosen had been working on, including Lennon’s diaries, photocopies of the diaries, transcripts of the diaries, and a rough draft of the manuscript.
According to Nowhere Man, Rosen then recreated from memory portions of Lennon’s diaries and combined this information with details from his own diaries about what had happened since Lennon and Ono hired Seaman in February 1979. A version of the manuscript was completed in 1982. An expanded version containing virtually all of the original material was published 18 years later. The book became a bestseller in the United States (Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2000), England (Mojo, October 2000), Japan (Amazon.co.jp, October 2000), Mexico, and Colombia.
Relationship with Yoko Ono
According to Nowhere Man, Rosen submitted his manuscript to Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, in July 1982. Wenner told Rosen that he couldn’t publish the manuscript and that Rosen’s only option was to tell his story to Ono. Rosen met with Ono at the Dakota in September 1982. She told him that she wanted to know everything that had happened since she’d hired Seaman, and asked to read his personal diaries. She also agreed to put Rosen on her payroll. The following day Rosen loaned Ono 16 volumes of his diaries, which she kept for 18 years, returning them as the first edition of Nowhere Man was going to press. She later asked Rosen to testify on her behalf at Seaman’s copyright infringement trial.
Playboy Article
Rosen also sent the Nowhere Man manuscript to Playboy magazine and met with its executive editor, G. Barry Golson, in July 1982. Golson then assigned a story about Lennon’s diaries to David Sheff and his wife at the time, Victoria Sheff. Ono cooperated with Playboy on the piece and gave the Sheffs access to Rosen’s diaries. From the half-million words he’d written in the diaries, the Sheffs excerpted about 200, including Rosen’s comment about Ono’s skillful exploitation of the Lennon legacy: “Dead Lennons=BIG $$$$$.” The article, “The Betrayal of John Lennon,” which ran in the March 1984 issue of Playboy, portrayed the comment as Rosen’s indictment of his own and Seaman’s behavior.
According to Rosen, the day the article was published, the Manhattan district attorney told him that he’d be arrested if he didn’t sign a document forfeiting his First Amendment rights to tell the story of John Lennon’s diaries. Rosen didn’t sign the document and he was not arrested. (See “An Open Letter to G. Barry Golson.” [3])
