The Doodle

I'm going to tell you something and you have to promise me that you will never tell anyone about this...Promise?...OK.

It's about a crime. Actually a perfect crime. A crime that went un-noticed. No one was hurt and the police were never involved.

But first, if you know anything about popular culture, you would be aware of The Beatles and the impact and influence that they had over the entire world through the 1960s and '70s.

John Lennon, said to be the guiding force and creative guru of the ensemble, had left his wife Cynthia for the Japanese artist 'Yoko Ono'.

Yoko taught John to think like an artist and not just a musician. John began to do doodle drawings of he and Yoko, in a series of pen and pencil drawings that would be made famous simply by him being a member of the Beatles.

And remember, don't tell anyone about this... please!

I had a tropical plant business back in the late 1980s, I started by hiring on with other plant service companies as a sub-contractor and worked mainly in Los Angeles and Orange County in southern California.

In short, plant maintenance consists of watering, cleaning the leaves, pest control and making sure that the plants get enough light. I had accounts with IBM and Apple computer in Orange county, (had weekly conversations with Apple CEO John Scully while tending to his plants)... A few accounts in Los Angeles too, among them, Columbia pictures in Studio city.

At Columbia pictures I would have to go through a guard gate to enter the lot, and once on the lot, I would drive past the giant sound stages that were built in the 1930s and '40s, past the bungalows that the movie stars occupied and past the 3 story buildings that the directors and producers kept company in... and one in particular,

The 'De Mille' building... a 3 story built sometime in the 1960s, would be the scene of the crime.

As I would enter any place where I was working, I would have a 5 gallon plastic bucket with me for water, a couple of spray bottles, one with chemicals to make the plants shiny and the other with some sort of pesticide to eliminate mealy bug and thrips, and clippers or scissors to cut off dead leaves.

Walking through the lot at Columbia pictures, it was not uncommon to see big stars like Cher or Warren Beatty or Bill Murry just hanging out in their bungalows or around the sound stages. I had a spiritual conversation with Molly Ringwald one morning after what appeared to have been an all-nighter for her, she's a lovely person.

All the top directors, writers, and producers made camp in the De Mille building. The third floor was the prized real estate, Spielberg, Coppola, and Scorsese among them.

I can't tell you which office or whom this story is about, but the initials of the famous director are J K.

The first time I entered the office of J K, I noticed a wall of pictures just to the right of the room as I came in the door, and ahead, very large windows that overlooked the bustling studio, and to the left a desk cluttered with odd movie memorabilia and screenplays and movie scripts.

The pictures on the wall went from one end of the room to the other and from the ceiling to the floor. One picture stood out a little more than the others on the wall, an original hand-drawn pencil doodle of John Lennon and Yoko Ono sitting on a cloud drawn by John Lennon himself.

"Must have cost him a small fortune?" I thought to myself upon witnessing it.

The picture had a unique frame around it, turquoise and silver, approximately 7 inches by 10 inches with a glass plate securing the original drawing. I admired it every time I passed through his office.

Then one day while I was shopping at Fashion Island in Newport Beach, I saw the very same frame at a high-end brick-a-brack shop... and that's when my mind went into overdrive.

I'm a fairly honest person. It never would cross my mind to steal anything or take something like that from an account that I truly cherished, the pay was great and being around movie stars and the like was kind of cool.

You have to remember that this was a time when computers were just becoming available to the general public and peripheral devices like printers and scanners, (very expensive back then) were also making leaps and bounds as far as their adaptability in everyday use. The internet was just taking off and was very slow and unreliable, not quite what it is today. But you could search it and find what you were looking for sometimes. I looked up John Lennon drawings and... voila, there it was, the very same picture I had seen on the wall in J K's office.

I didn't have any experience at all with computers or printers or scanners for that matter, but I learned. If I were sneaky about it, I thought to myself, I could easily swap the pictures. And after many attempts, I resized and printed a similar copy of the drawing. Something wasn't quite right though, and then it hit me, in order for this to look real, I was going to have to draw over the printed picture with an actual pencil, staying completely within the lines and do it without any smudges. I tried many different sizes and shades of pencils and finally settled on a 4-B hi-precision drafting pencil.

I bought the frame I had seen in the shop, and after about 60 or so tries at tracing the picture, it finally looked exactly like the picture on the wall, in the office on the 3rd floor of the De Mille building.

Long story short... Making the switch was easier than I imagined. A long-sleeved shirt with the tails untucked, the fake doodle halfway down the back of my jeans and after a few tries, I would possess the iconic superstars' original whim.

Original pen and pencil drawings by John Lennon go for between $150,000 and $300,000 dollars these days and J K may never know that the picture on his wall is a forgery. The picture hangs on my wall now, many miles from the bright lights of Los Angeles, and I admire it daily...would you admit? it was a perfect crime?