Marrying John Lennon brought Yoko Ono a dizzying degree of reflected fame. But her life story is nervy, compelling and shockingly sad both with and without him.
David Sheff’s new biography “Yoko” (Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., out now) depicts the avant-garde artist and activist from a surprising vantage point: He spent weeks talking with the couple for what would be the former Beatle’s final “Playboy” interview in 1980. After Lennon’s murder, Sheff developed a friendship with Ono, now 92, and received access to her family, collaborators and confidants.
What emerges feels sympathetic yet honest and occasionally humorous.
Among the book’s biggest revelations:
Ono’s peace efforts stemmed from her own experiences as a Japanese American during World War II
Ono’s wealthy but emotionally aloof parents sent her to a farming village with her younger siblings for safety amid the bombing of Tokyo, where the 12-year-old begged and bartered their belongings for rice. She suffered anemia, malnutrition and developed pleurisy. Anxious and lonely, Ono would count her breaths for fear she’d forget to breathe at all.
Ever the optimist, her coping mechanisms were looking at the sky (a recurring theme in her art and music) and “imagining” her favorite foods − imagery familiar to fans of the song “Imagine.”
“That was my sister’s first conceptual art piece,” her brother Kei recalls.
Ono struggled with suicidal thoughts and met husband Tony Cox in a mental hospital after an overdose attempt
Starting in her teens, Ono made multiple efforts to kill herself. Her first husband, pianist and composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, prevented her from jumping out of the window of their eleventh-story apartment. Eventually, after swallowing a handful of pills, she woke up in a mental hospital.
Cox, an American admirer of her art, tracked Ono down while visiting Japan and advocated for her release, telling the hospital she was a famous artist in the U.S.
They wed when she became pregnant with their daughter, Kyoko, in 1962. Becoming a mother relieved Ono of her desire to kill herself, she said.
Later, after she left him to marry Lennon, Cox kidnapped Kyoko and disappeared into a cult, separating Ono from her child for decades.
Often jeered by critics, Ono is a trained singer who studied German lieder and opera
Her disappointed father, Eisuke, deemed her hands “too small” to be a great pianist.
When she proposed studying music composition, he suggested she become an opera singer.
For years, she took formal lessons while also experimenting with her signature screeching, howling and caterwauling.
Her marriage to John Lennon suffered after he had sex with a woman at a party they attended
The incident is a known one, but Sheff describes it in horrifying detail.
In 1972, John and Yoko went to a party at activist Jerry Rubin’s home to watch election returns. Lennon, angry about Richard Nixon’s re-election and under the influence, began canoodling with a female guest and went off into the next room to engage in noisy intercourse. Photographer Bob Gruen hurriedly put on Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” for distraction while Yoko sat quietly humiliated.
The next year, Ono separated from Lennon, sending him away with her assistant May Pang for an 18-month period he would refer to as his “lost weekend.”
John and Yoko reconciled at the end of 1974, and the late 1970s would turn out to be the happiest she’d been in her life. “She spoke about surrendering to love, and for her it really was a surrender − with John, her protective walls finally came down,” Sheff writes.
After John Lennon’s murder, his son Sean would be smuggled out of the Dakota in a black bag
For weeks, Yoko and Sean attempted to grieve and sleep as thousands of singing fans kept vigil outside The Dakota, their apartment building in New York.
Later, concerned about a delusional man in front of the apartment, Sean’s bodyguards would conceal the frightened child in a bag and carry him past the man’s parked van for the walk to school.
But betrayals were happening inside their home, too. John’s personal possessions, including his diaries, were disappearing. His killer wrote Ono, asking her permission to write a memoir and donate the proceeds to charity. One of Ono’s drivers demanded millions and was charged with extortion.
She tried to move on with positivity, but Ono didn’t always have it in her. When asked if she could forgive Lennon’s killer, as Pope John Paul II had his attempted assassin, she said simply, “I’m not the pope.”
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