The Telegraph
David Sheff spent many hours with Ono and John Lennon and has strong views on her talent - and how profoundly she changed pop culture
Rosa Silverman
Yoko Ono has been characterised as many things during her lifetime, most of them negative. Even now, she’s still lazily seen as the woman who broke up the Beatles.
But she was no groupie or hanger-on; Ono was in fact an avant-garde artist asking challenging questions about art itself long before she met Lennon, as a new book about her seeks to show. The art world has belatedly come to appreciate her, dedicating a Tate Modern retrospective to her work last year. But to many others she has always been, as her biographer David Sheff writes, “a caricature, a curiosity, or even a villain – an inscrutable seductress, a manipulating con artist, and a caterwauling fraud who hypnotised Lennon and broke up the greatest band in history”.
This, he notes, is her portrayal in so many of the thousands of books and articles written about the Beatles. Now, in Yoko: A Biography, Sheff is on a mission to change that; to hold each Yoko Ono trope up to the light and expose it as the misogynistic, racist or misconceived notion it is. To set the record straight.
“That’s my goal, that people will look at her again and understand how important she was in art, music, feminism, activism; how much more she was than a Beatle wife,” Sheff says.
He is speaking on Zoom from his home an hour or so north of San Francisco. Beyond his window, a light morning fog hangs in the air. He sits at his desk, a gentle, earnest and softly spoken presence who hopes his account of Ono’s life will chip away at the popular idea of her and draw her anew.
Sheff is well-placed to do Ono’s story justice. As an American writer and journalist, his most famous work is probably his bestselling memoir about his son’s battle with methamphetamine addiction, Beautiful Boy, which was adapted into an acclaimed film starring Timothée Chalamet in 2018. Less well known is his decades-long friendship with Ono, which serves as the lens through which he approaches his subject. If it makes him biased, he insists he set out to offer a “warts and all” telling. But he also acknowledges that their friendship is what enables him to take an alternative perspective on 92-year-old Ono.
It began in 1980, when a 24-year-old Sheff landed an assignment to interview Lennon and Ono for Playboy magazine. Gaining access to one of the world’s most famous couples was, unsurprisingly, tough. Having retreated from the limelight, they were at this point enjoying a clean and quiet existence in their apartment complex in New York’s Dakota building on the Upper West Side. Undeterred, the enterprising Sheff showered them with a blizzard of letters, eventually reaching a producer who was working with Lennon and Ono on their Double Fantasy album. Sheff received a phone call from Ono’s assistant, who asked when he had been born.
“Because apparently that’s how Yoko made a lot of decisions in her life and business – based on people’s horoscopes and numerological charts,” says Sheff.
Luckily his stars satisfied Ono, and he received an invitation to travel from Los Angeles to New York to meet her. “She confirmed my numbers were good and said they aligned with John’s, and after this meeting she agreed to the interview,” he recalls.
What followed was a period that the world’s Beatles chroniclers could only have dreamed of: three weeks spent with Lennon and Ono, during which they offered Sheff an intimate insight into their marriage and thoughts. He accompanied them to the recording studio, hung out with them in their kitchen, joined them for strolls (with Lennon and Ono walking hand in hand), for lunch and dinner.
“It was sort of extraordinary,” he says. “They just let me into their lives for those three weeks.”
Lennon had an ulterior motive: he wanted the world to see what he saw in Ono. “Part of the reason he did the interview, and [why] he was so impassioned and so adamant throughout [it] to focus on Yoko, is he wanted people to understand what he understood about her as an artist and as a person,” says Sheff.
During those three weeks, and over the subsequent years, it became clear to Sheff that the world had indeed got her wrong. He admits that before meeting her, he had absorbed some of the media narrative that she somehow controlled Lennon. Besides the myth that she had broken up the Beatles, she was seen as a home-wrecker (Lennon had left his first wife Cynthia for her, the mother of his first son, Julian); as a “shrew” who kept her husband “like a dog on a leash”, as Sheff puts it.
What Sheff saw was something quite different. “They adored each other,” he says. “They would light up when the other one would come in. They teased each other a lot. John especially teased Yoko, in a very loving way. People talked about how Yoko rarely smiled in public but in private she smiled a lot. She was sort of giggly with John, they were very affectionate. Theirs was a genuine love story of our time.”
In the mid-1970s, they had separated for an 18-month period that Lennon euphemistically referred to as his “lost weekend”. He was becoming needy, “difficult to live with” and Ono sometimes felt “smothered” by him, writes Sheff. During this time, Lennon had a relationship with Ono’s assistant May Pang (encouraged by Ono herself), and drank excessively. “He said he could have died because he drank so much,” says Sheff.
But by September 1980, when Sheff was with them, the couple had put their alcohol and heroin abuse behind them and were attempting to follow a macrobiotic diet, even if they frequently fell off that particular wagon. Their fridge was full of chocolate.
“Sugar was maybe the weakness they had... but no alcohol, no drugs were around,” says Sheff.
Lennon talked about how they had struggled to conceive a child, and how an acupuncturist had advised them to quit drugs and booze. Their son, Sean Ono Lennon, was now almost five, and Lennon was an adoring, hands-on father. He would climb on to the circus trampoline in his son’s enormous playroom with him, or hold Sean on his lap, teasing, snuggling, singing to him.
“He was John Lennon, he was a Beatle, he had accomplished as much as anyone ever could, he was a genius in terms of his creative output, and yet the thing that he said gave him the only satisfaction, the only true peaks he had ever had in his life, was his relationship with Yoko and becoming a father,” says Sheff.
Lennon would leave the recording studio early to put Sean to bed. He told Sheff of his irritation when, Lennon claimed, Paul McCartney had turned up unannounced, interrupting his domestic harmony. Although it was good to see his old bandmate sometimes, Lennon spoke of a time when he was “really annoyed with [Paul] for just showing up [at the Dakota]. He said, ‘I’m taking care of the baby and this guy shows up and wants to talk about the old days.’ He said that when you grow up, you leave the boys behind and once in a while you might want to get together for some beers or something, but you go off and live your life, you get married and have a family and that’s your life.”
That was Lennon’s life then. Ono remained devoted to her work as well as to her husband.
The Beatles continue to inspire a steady stream of books and documentaries, with no sign of the interest abating. Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, a documentary by Alan G Parker, will arrive in British cinemas in May. Sir Sam Mendes’ four films about the Beatles, each seen from one member’s perspective, are slated for 2027. Yet relatively little has been written about Ono’s background and work.
Through his spare, unfussy prose, Sheff takes a chronological approach to both, meaning Lennon doesn’t even appear in the book until almost 60 pages in. The deliberate effect is that Ono is defined not in relation to her more famous husband, but as a person and artist in her own right.
We learn about her early life as a child born in Japan in 1933 to a prominent and privileged family. Her parents were “distant and dismissive… unavailable”, Sheff writes. The young Yoko craved love and connection, “but those needs were never fulfilled in her youth, and in response she built walls between herself and others”.
Her aloofness came to be seen as arrogance, “but it masked a deep longing and sadness”, as Sheff tells it. It is one of many ways, perhaps, in which Ono was misunderstood.
She was eight years old when the Second World War hit Japan in 1941. To escape the firebombing of Tokyo, she was evacuated to a village where, despite her family’s wealth, she was reduced to begging for food amid shortages. Sometimes she was left starving. After the war, as a teenager, she was so depressed she attempted suicide.
Sheff describes how wartime hardship and the emotional poverty and loneliness of her childhood saw her take refuge in her imagination. In the absence of actual food or love, she imagined.
Against this background of pain, longing and hope for something better, Ono forged an identity as an artist in New York in the 1950s and 1960s.
Among a loose community of artists influenced by Dada and Marcel Duchamp, and inspired by the avant-garde composer John Cage, Ono made art “non-stop”. Her work was whimsical, experimental, ephemeral. It did not conform to traditional ideas of what art was or should be. It required the audience to participate in its creation and meaning.
There was Painting To Be Stepped On, a piece of canvas on the floor that the audience was invited to walk across. Pea Piece carried the instruction: “Carry a bag of peas. Leave a pea wherever you go.” In Kitchen Piece, she wrote: “Hang a canvas on the wall. Throw all the leftovers you have in the kitchen that day on the canvas. You may prepare special food for the piece.”
Was this art? That very much depended on your perspective, and possibly on when you were born. At the time there were plenty who would answer no. Today, many Turner Prizes later, we are infinitely more familiar and comfortable with conceptual art of this sort. Last year’s well-reviewed Ono show at Tate Modern, Music of the Mind, might be seen as vindication of sorts.
But six decades ago, Ono’s playful, irreverent and sometimes political departure from the status quo, in what was then a sexist art world, can be seen as pioneering.
As Sheff explains, her instruction pieces disrupted the relationship between audience and artist. One fateful day in 1966, her art also led to a new relationship altogether, not between artist and audience but between two artists. The other one was Lennon.
That autumn, Ono exhibited her work at central London’s Indica Gallery. Lennon showed up the night before the opening and was introduced to Ono by the gallery owner, John Dunbar. One of Ono’s works on display was called Apple. It consisted simply of an apple atop a stand. It was meant to be about the cycle of life, and the idea was it would rot and then disintegrate. Lennon had other ideas and took a bite.
He then turned his attention to Ono’s Ceiling Painting, which consisted of a ladder leading up to the ceiling, on which the word “yes” was printed on a piece of paper. Lennon climbed the ladder, read the word and was impressed.
But Painting To Hammer a Nail was what clinched it. A white wooden panel hung on the wall, while a hammer dangled on a chain and a can of nails was placed on a chair beneath. Ono agreed that Lennon could hammer in a nail if he paid five shillings. He replied that he would give her an imaginary five shillings and hammer in an imaginary nail. That, Lennon told Sheff later, was when they really met.
It has been suggested that Ono pursued Lennon. But this is another shibboleth dismantled by Sheff, who cites Dunbar’s firm denial of that version of events. Ono was “too cool” to stalk Lennon, Dunbar has said. She did not chase him in a taxi, as has been claimed. He should know because, as he pointed out, he was there.
What Sheff witnessed later was that Lennon depended on Ono. “That was absolutely part of their relationship,” he says. “John lost his mother when he was young. He said he was always looking for a mother figure, and Yoko really provided that. He said, ‘I was the famous one and got a lot of the attention, but she taught me to be a person. She taught me everything I f—king know.’ And as much as she was loving towards John, it was more that John was really obsessed with Yoko in that way.”
He called her “mother” all the time, says Sheff. “I think he would have been the first to admit that he really needed her… He was devoted to her.”
The public had their own views. Outside Abbey Road Studios in London, fans taunted the couple as they came and went. The press was hostile too. Blatant racism and sexism coursed through the attacks on Ono from a seemingly endless wellspring.
These prejudices have since been called out for what they were; yet Sheff believes misogyny and racism continue to underpin responses to Ono today. He hopes in time this will change.
He also hopes to put to bed that other famous misconception. He writes that “John, not Yoko, broke up the Beatles” when he declared he was leaving the band. And although he allows that Ono was a “catalyst”, Sheff suggests that without her agreeing to stay by Lennon’s side during the sessions that produced the final Beatles albums, the singer might have left sooner.
“There’s a version of the Beatles story in which there’d be no Let It Be or Abbey Road without Yoko,” Sheff writes.
After the band’s break-up, Lennon and Ono moved to New York in 1971. Just as they had bonded over imaginary shillings and an imaginary nail, imagining was a theme of their relationship and their message. Creatively speaking, it was a fruitful ideal, and in 2017, Ono was added to the writing credits for Lennon’s 1971 hit Imagine, which invited the world to imagine there is “nothing to kill or die for”. Her influence on him was immense but poorly grasped, argues Sheff.
“She really was this hated figure in the history of the Beatles and the history of rock ’n’ roll. I don’t think people understood her as an artist, they didn’t understand how important she was to John in terms of his art,” he says. “She really influenced John in terms of specific works like Imagine and Give Peace a Chance, but also… the way she believed in positive thinking.”
The last time Sheff spoke to Lennon was over the phone. Lennon had read Sheff’s Playboy interview and told Sheff how happy he was that, through it, people would see Ono in the way he saw her. His final words to Sheff during the interview itself had been even more poignant.
“The last thing he said [to me] I think was about how he was looking forward to the future, when of course the future held that a couple of months later he was going to be killed.”
On the evening of 8 December 1980, Lennon was fatally shot by fan Mark Chapman outside the Dakota building. Like millions of people worldwide, Sheff was devastated. He tried to call Ono but couldn’t get through, so he headed straight to the airport and boarded a plane to New York. So many fans had gathered outside the Dakota, mourning, crying and singing Lennon’s songs, that Sheff couldn’t reach the door.
When he did get to Ono, she was broken. “We just cried,” he recalls. “She was in her bedroom and she looked like she was going to disappear. I later learnt how worried the people around her were that she would actually try to take her own life. That’s how dark it was to be with her.”
In between tears, she would talk of the plans she and Lennon had made for the future: the Broadway musical and tour they had discussed doing; the album they hadn’t yet finished (which became Milk and Honey, and was released in 1984). “She would talk about things, then break down and cry out ‘John!’,” says Sheff.
Ono remained “a shell of a person” for a long time afterwards, he says. Amid her grief, she was dealing with threats and hate mail. She surrounded herself with security. Sheff was a friend to her during this painful period and beyond.
Sheff, pictured at the ‘Beautiful Boy’ film premiere in 2018, supported Ono after the death of Lennon
“The first year she was very fragile, wounded and traumatised. She really had a kind of post-traumatic stress that stayed with her and you could feel [it] when you were with her,” he says. “Over many years she did recover. I don’t know if she ever fully recovered.”
She immersed herself in her work meanwhile, releasing a solo album, Season of Glass, the year after Lennon’s death. “She really used her art as a way to heal,” says Sheff.
He continued to see her until around 2008, by which time Sheff was focused on helping his son with his problems. After this, they kept in touch until the mid 2010s. By the time he decided to write her biography in 2021, they were no longer in contact. Ono had stopped giving interviews, retired from her work and moved to upstate New York, where she still lives on the farm she bought with Lennon.
Sean, now 49, as well as Ono’s daughter from a previous marriage, Kyoko Ono Cox, 61, agreed to talk to Sheff for his biography. Sheff believes Ono herself would be pleased with the book, since it focuses on “the story people don’t know, on her as an artist…and [her] continued work for peace”.
What will her legacy be?
“The art will continue to be important. Some of her music is important. But I feel the big part of her legacy will be her relationship with John and the peace work they did.”
Ono sometimes said she thought the reason she and Lennon got together was to create the song Imagine. “That’s probably her greatest legacy,” Sheff adds.
When future generations assess Ono afresh, part of Sheff’s own legacy might be the compelling counter-narrative he has written about her: one in which Yoko is given her rightful place in the Beatles story and in her own. Imagine that.
Yoko: A Biography, by David Sheff, is out on 25 March (Simon & Schuster, £25)
