AARP Magazine

David Sheff’s ‘Yoko’ offers insights into the remarkable life of John Lennon’s controversial muse

Maria Speidel

Published March 24, 2025

If Yoko Ono’s life were a novel, it would be a twisting, turning, wildly unpredictable epic. What a story: Little Yoko was the scion of a powerful Japanese family who lived through Tokyo’s bombing in World War II and grew into an important avant-garde artist. That was before becoming the much-maligned wife of musical icon John Lennon and shouldering the blame for breaking up his previous marriage and the Beatles. Then she witnessed her beloved husband gunned down in front of their apartment at the Dakota in New York City on Dec. 8, 1980.

Author David Sheff, 69, who’s written other notable books, including the 2008 bestseller Beautiful Boy about his son’s drug addiction (adapted into a 2018 movie of the same name), captures this all in Yoko, his new biography of Ono, 92, with whom he’s maintained a friendship since he interviewed her and Lennon for Playboy in 1980. When Lennon died less than three months after that interview, Sheff hopped on a red eye from California to be by Ono’s side.

He has said he was inspired to write the biography after sighting a bumper sticker that read, “Still Pissed at Yoko.”

Yoko did not sit for new interviews for this book because, her book publicist says, she stopped granting interviews in 2020, “essentially retiring.” Instead, the author drew on the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours he spent interviewing and hanging out with her over the last 40-odd years, as well as interviews with people close to her, including her son, Sean, and her daughter, Kyoko.

Here are some highlights from Yoko.

1. Yoko Ono’s wealthy parents gave her everything — except affection.

Ono’s parents came from powerful Japanese banking families. Her artistically frustrated father, Eisuke, was a gifted pianist who ended up yoked to the family business. Her glamorous mother, Isoko, left child-rearing to nannies, who were instructed never to rock the baby or help her up if she fell. Ono did not meet her father until she was two and a half years old because he was abroad running a branch bank in San Francisco, where the family eventually joined him.

2. The trauma of living through World War II permeated her whole life.

As a young girl sheltering in place with her mother and two younger siblings in Tokyo, she saw the city bombed and heard Kamikaze pilots broadcast their goodbyes on the radio. “It was just the most horrific thing that I’ve heard,” she once told the BBC. “I think that changed my whole idea about war.” Eventually, her mother dispatched the children to the countryside, where Ono, 12, bartered their possessions for food. She suffered from malnutrition and endured an appendectomy with insufficient anesthesia. A doctor made inappropriate sexual advances. After the war, teenage Ono suffered from bad earaches and depression, and attempted suicide.

3. A multi-media performance artist before those terms existed, Ono helped fuel New York City’s avant-garde art movement.

Ono dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.. in 1956 at the end of her junior year, “asphyxiated by conservative teachers,” she said. She married her first husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi, a Japanese pianist studying at Julliard that same year. The two became fans and proteges of the experimental composer John Cage. Ono rented a loft space downtown and held candle-lit concerts and art exhibits. One of her most famous works from the 1960s was the feminist statement, Cut Piece, where audience members were invited onstage to pick up scissors and shear off parts of her clothing. In 2020, the New York Times deemed it one of the “most influential works of American protest art since World War II.”

4. She attempted suicide in Japan.

Although Ono and Ichiyanagi, who passed away in 2022, grew estranged, he convinced her to return to Japan in 1962. She fell into a depression when her shows there received negative reviews, and her parents turned against her. She “took a handful of pills” and was put in a psychiatric ward. Tony Cox, an artist visiting from New York, sought her out and talked the doctors into releasing her. They became involved, Ono got pregnant, they married, and their daughter Kyoto Ono Cox was born on Aug. 3, 1963. Soon after their 1969 divorce, she’d marry Lennon, whom she met while exhibiting in London.

5. The couple struggled with addiction.

Early in their relationship, Ono and Lennon resorted to snorting what Lennon called “h” (heroin) to deal with the hate they felt the other Beatles, business associates, and fans piled on them. Although they kicked that habit, they later became addicted to methadone but weaned themselves off that with the help of a Bay Area Chinese herbalist and acupuncturist, Yuan Bain Hong. For a week, the couple slept on the couch at Hong’s modest San Mateo family duplex and availed themselves of his help, says Sheff, citing his interview with the journalist Craig Pyes, who had put Ono and Lennon in touch with the herbalist.

6. Her daughter was kidnapped

She and Lennon moved to America in 1971, hoping to win custody of Kyoko, then eight (now 61), who mostly had been raised by her father and was now with him in Texas. But Cox took off with Kyoko again and went underground for years. Kyoko later said these days were “a battle” and that she was afraid her father would be jailed if she called her mom. At one point, the father and daughter joined a cult, the Church of the Living Word (also known as “The Walk”). Kyoto finally reached out to Ono after she’d turned 28 and had become a mom herself. A friend told Sheff, “When Kyoko came back, Yoko was the most whole since John was killed.”

7. Ono picked out a mistress for her husband.

She faced relentless criticism about her influence on him and the band., once telling Sheff she was sick of the constant “vibration of hate” she felt from people. After Lennon cheated on her openly at a party, Ono called for a marital timeout and set her husband up with their young assistant, May Pang. “I needed a rest,” she told Sheff. “I needed space.” These 18 months apart, beginning in 1974, became known as Lennon’s Lost Weekend .

8. Ono and Lennon upended traditional parenting roles.

She and Lennon desperately wanted a baby together, and Ono suffered at least two miscarriages before Sean Ono Lennon was born on Oct. 9, 1975, his father’s 35th birthday. Ono made it clear to John that he would be the baby’s primary caregiver. “If a father raises the child and a mother carries it, the responsibility is shared,” she told Sheff. “That is a better way. I am not criticizing myself. This is what I am, and I can’t be anything else.” Lennon happily complied.

9. Ono was deep into tarot cards and other alternative spirituality.

She lived by astrology charts, the tarot, numerology, and psychics. She meditated, manifested, and thanked the universe. Lennon once told a friend, “There will be times you’ll think she’s bloody mad. Just do what she tells you to do. She’s almost always right.” Unfortunately, after Lennon’s death, unscrupulous psychics preyed on the widow, some claiming John was speaking to them from beyond.

Her companion Sam Havadtoy went to great lengths to catch the psychics manipulating Ono (he even bugged her phone), but could not get her to stop consulting them. “She was so insecure, she felt so alone, that she wanted help for herself,” he told Sheff.

10. Being John’s partner put a permanent bullseye on her.

Ono never fit the pretty white female mold the world expected in a Beatles girlfriend. Fans and the press pelted her with insults and racial slurs. After John’s death, things got dangerous. She received a barrage of death threats through the mail, including a bullet-ridden copy of Double Fantasy, the album they made right before Johns’s death. The accompanying note said the sender was in New York to kill Ono. Yoko and Sean had round-the-clock security. At 15, Sean went to a boarding school in Switzerland to experience life without bodyguards.

11. She had a longtime romantic partner after John’s death.

Hungarian interior decorator Sam Havadtoy was Yoko’s companion from about 1981 to 2000. Lennon and Ono met him together when they wandered into the antique store where he worked. He became their decorator and Ono’s friend. After John’s death, their relationship became romantic. He moved into the Dakota, helping Ono with security and business and raising Sean. But he was displeased that she never publicly acknowledged him, and the two eventually grew apart.

12. Sheff argues that she did not break up the Beatles.

“Although John did break up the Beatles, it’s possible that the band stayed together longer than they would have because of Yoko,” he writes. Sheff notes that Ono accompanied Lennon to the recordings of the Beatles’ final albums, Let It Be and Abbey Road, and would sometimes hold his hand and keep him on task. “John had a foot out the door,” Sheff writes. “If he hadn’t had Yoko, the other foot might have followed sooner than it did.”

13. She’s living a quiet life now.

During Covid, she left her longtime residence in the Dakota and moved permanently to the farm in upstate New York, which she and John purchased in the 1970s. Her public appearances have dwindled over the last six years, and Sean has officially taken over the family business. “She is very happy,” Sheff quotes her daughter Kyoto Ono as saying. “This is a well-deserved and genuine peacefulness.”

Maria Speidel is a writer who lives in Los Angeles with a house full of books.