TORONTO - Gail Renard was just 16 when she and a schoolmate descended on Montreal's Queen Elizabeth Hotel in late May 1969 after hearing it was the site of a "bed-in for peace'' being held by newlyweds John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
"There were lots of fans ... starting to surround the outside so we did a mission impossible, going in back ways and back staircases,'' the Montreal-raised Renard said Tuesday in a telephone interview from London, where she now lives.
"They wouldn't let anyone on that floor of the hotel, so we went to the floor above, sneaked back and ... there was a security man. We waited until he went off for a second to go to the loo, to the bathroom, and we ran up and knocked on the door and Yoko answered and I said: `Please, can I have an interview for my school paper?'''
Ono let the teens into the room, where Renard gave a hungry Lennon her chocolate bar and quickly gained his trust -- so much so that the Beatle frontman allowed her to interview him and stay for the full eight-day "bed-in.''
At the end of the event, a pyjama-clad Lennon gave her an autographed picture and a piece of cardboard on which he had scribbled in black marker the lyrics to "Give Peace a Chance,'' sung and recorded in the suite on June 1, 1969.
Renard, 55, is now putting that prized memento on the auction block at Christie's in London.
"He was always insistent that these things would be worth something one day,'' said the TV comedy writer, who kept the item framed on her wall and later in a vault but recently decided to sell it so it "could be enjoyed.''
Christie's estimates it could fetch as much as $600,000 when it goes up for auction at its July 10 rock and pop memorabilia sale.
Dozens of previously unpublished photographs Renard took during the event are also going under the hammer at the sale.
The "bed-in'' was the second held by Lennon and Ono (the first was in Amsterdam) as a way to draw attention to the war in Vietnam, when the Beatles were on the verge of breaking up.
Visitors to the Montreal event included comedian Tommy Smothers, drug guru Timothy Leary and a group of Hare Krishnas, all of whom can be heard chanting on "Give Peace a Chance.''
"It was a bit like `Alice in Wonderland,' '' said Renard of the experience, during which she also helped look after Ono's young daughter, Kyoko.
Tommy Schnurmacher, a talk show host at Montreal radio station CJAD, was the schoolmate who was with Renard the whole time.
"I'm the reason she went,'' he said Tuesday in an interview. "She didn't want to go, she said we'd never get in and I said, `Let's give it a shot.'''
Schnurmacher said it was a pack of his little sister's crayons that he had in his hands that helped them get into the room after the security guard reappeared.
"As we were about to be thrown out by the security, Yoko opened the door and little Kyoko asked if she could have the crayons and I said, `Not if we're about to be thrown out,' and Yoko said, `These are our friends.' She'd never laid eyes on us before but she invited us in,'' he said.
Schnurmacher took photographs in the room but has no other memorabilia from the experience.
Renard, on the other hand, remained friends with Lennon for years after that fateful week in suite 1742, meeting up with him in Toronto and calling him on his "magic'' phone number.
"Wherever he was in the world, if you needed something, if you rang that number they would get in touch (with him), and it worked,'' she said with a chuckle.
Lennon even helped jumpstart her journalism career by calling the Beatles Monthly magazine in Britain and insisting they publish Renard's article on the bed-in.
"I think I was born under a lucky star -- and I had a chocolate bar,'' Renard said with a laugh as she speculated on why Lennon was so nice to her from the get-go.
"I was innocent and it really was love and peace and the times were that innocent and he took care of me.''
