San Francisco Chronicle
David Sheff’s lifelong friendship with Yoko Ono proves fertile fodder in revelatory new biography
By Zack Ruskin
March 21, 2025
John Lennon once proclaimed Yoko Ono to be “the most famous unknown artist in the world.” But that didn’t keep critics from viciously blaming his wife for the Beatles’ demise. The real story of Yoko Ono is one of a seminal activist, artist and musician whose influence — on her own merit — stretches the globe.
Bestselling author David Sheff has known this to be true for a long time. Now, nearly 50 years later, the former music journalist has finally distilled his archive of interviews and notes into “Yoko: A Biography,” a decisive rebuke to decades of slander and scorn to paint the full picture of a woman without equal in the 20th century.
Best known for his 2008 memoir “Beautiful Boy,” an illuminating yet heartbreaking work chronicled Sheff’s struggles to help his son overcome a methamphetamine addiction, the longtime Marin County resident is scheduled to appear at Book Passage in Corte Madera on April 10, to discuss his relationship with Ono.
It all began with a fateful assignment from Playboy magazine, who flew a 24-year-old Sheff to New York City to spend three weeks with Lennon and Ono. The article that would ultimately serve as one of the pair’s final interviews, and it all came about, according to Sheff, because the stars were aligned.
“I got a call from her assistant asking me when and where I was born,” he recalled. “It was weird, but I told them, and the next day, I got a call saying that Yoko had agreed to meet me. My horoscope and numerological charts somehow blessed me. Yoko told me that I had the same numbers as John, and that was partly why she agreed to go forward with the interview.”
For his assignment, Sheff hung out at their apartment, shadowed them in the studio as they recorded songs for their 1980 album “Double Fantasy,” and chatted with the couple at local coffee shops. It was during this period that he would first come to appreciate Ono’s role as Lennon’s creative equal.
“They really were partners,” he said. “I was in the booth with them, and they would ask each other for their opinions and make decisions together. John was very deferential to her. When I saw her record the song ‘Kiss Kiss Kiss,’ it was so powerful that it was clear she was an artist.”
Soon after, with Sheff back home in Los Angeles, he remembers he was watching Monday Night Football when he heard Howard Cosell interrupt the broadcast to share news of Lennon’s death. The young journalist immediately flew back to New York, becoming one of the few people Ono eventually permitted to be with her during a period of profound suffering.
“It took me a while to finally get in to see her, but when I did, it was to see somebody who was completely broken,” he recalled. “We cried together because there wasn't a lot to say.
“That was the beginning of me going to spend time with her.”
Ono’s fascinating life started long before she met Sheff, of course. Raised in Tokyo, her childhood was marked by wealth and loneliness. Born into one of Japan’s most prosperous business families, Ono’s first visit to San Francisco at the age of 2 would also mark her first time meeting her father, then the head of the San Francisco branch of Yokohama Specie Bank. Often separated, Ono’s father was still statewide when her life was upended by the horrors of World War II.
Later, following Lennon’s death, Ono would frequently return to San Francisco, even planning to move to the area in the 1980s at a time when New York felt “especially dangerous because of threats on her life,” according to Sheff.
His biography makes a strong case against any suggestion that Ono caused the Beatles’ split while highlighting her numerous contributions to the worlds of music, sculpture, performance art and activism.
Combining countless hours of interviews spanning Sheff and Ono’s friendship as well as chats with her friends, family, peers and admirers, “Yoko” is, in the words of Sheff’s editor Eamon Dolan, “neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job.”
“I've been an editor for over 30 years now,” noted Dolan, who has worked with Sheff since 2005. “I've edited a lot of biographies, and I've read even more, and I've never seen a book do as good a job of striking that balance regarding their subject as this one does.”
Among the voices who helped achieve that balance was Sheff’s longtime friend and famed rock ‘n’ roll photographer Bob Gruen, another one of Ono’s close friends.
“The first thing (of David’s) that I read was his Playboy interview with John and Yoko,” Gruen said. “I think it’s the best interview anybody ever did with John. I often tell people, if they want to know about John Lennon, read what he said in that interview. He tells all.”
As for what Sheff hopes readers will take from his new biography, he believes Ono’s message of hope and peace is more powerful and relevant as ever.
“When ‘Imagine’ came out, it was released as a John Lennon song. John did the music and performed the song, but he later really regretted not crediting Yoko,” Sheff explained. “When I interviewed him in 1980, he made a big point of telling me that Yoko was the co-writer of ‘Imagine.’ And it wasn't just that she co-wrote the lyrics — which she did — it was really her song in a way.
‘Imagine’ encapsulates Yoko's thinking, this idea that if we imagine a better world, we can create one.”