Washington Post
David Sheff’s new biography, “Yoko,” digs deeply into the artist’s life and offers a welcome reassessment of her place in cultural history.
March 25, 2025
Review by Geoff Edgers
The groupies were everywhere, but Yoko Ono was not one of them. It was Nov. 7, 1966, when she met John Lennon for the first time. He and the Beatles were about to start making “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” She was putting the final touches on a big solo art show.
Lennon arrived at London’s Indica Gallery for a private sneak preview.
“I had heard about the Beatles,” Ono said afterward, “and I knew the name Ringo, and nobody’s going to believe me, but still that’s exactly how it was. Ringo hit me because ‘ringo’ is ‘apple’ in Japanese. … Rock and roll had passed me by. But I met him and felt he was an incredibly interesting man.”
What Ono knew is that this special celebrity — ushered in by gallery director John Dunbar a day before the solo show opened — seemed both mischievously entertaining and a bit on the wrong side of confidence. The mythology, of course, is that Ono latched onto Lennon as a career-boosting opportunity, that she was a home-wrecker and a band-wrecker desperate for fame. David Sheff, the author of a new biography simply titled “Yoko,” dismisses this idea.
“Yoko,” by David Sheff. (Simon & Schuster)
“Who knows what was going on in their heads, but Yoko was preoccupied with the exhibit,” Dunbar tells Sheff. “He was just some guy who I made a big deal about. She didn’t stalk him or pursue him.”
Ono did walk Lennon around, showing him the conceptual pieces that landed her into an experimental art movement, Fluxus, that included composer John Cage and video artist Nam June Paik. There was an all-white chess set on a white table, a piece meant to speak to the futility of war. Another work, called “Forget It,” was a sewing needle that included the following instructions: “Once I give the instruction ‘Forget It,’ you can never forget it.”
And there was an apple on a stand with a sign saying “apple.”
Lennon, without warning or permission, grabbed the apple and took a bite. This did not please Ono. The idea had been to show the cycle of life through the fruit’s slow decay. (The apple would be replaced for the opening.)
But for both of them, the walk-through would mark the start of an intense, sometimes complicated relationship ended 14 years later by an assassin’s bullet.
The past decade or so has brought a great reassessment of Ono. Beatles fans who stupidly blamed her for the band’s breakup have either piped down or realized the true root of the split: money, credit and basic human dynamics. Ono detractors, who mocked her wailing vocal performances, perhaps realize her work was not meant to play alongside the latest Doobie Brothers single. A list of respected popular artists — David Byrne, Lady Gaga, St. Vincent — have spoken of her influence.
Sheff’s most important accomplishment may be taking this reframing a step further. By explaining Ono’s personal history and artistic path, he builds the case that she, not Lennon, was more damaged career-wise by their union. From the moment they got together, her work would be viewed through the prism of the Beatlemaniacs. Instead of art critics debating the meaning of her conceptual pieces, Ono would be subjected to mainstream judginess, prime-time Americana trying to make sense of her shrieks during Chuck Berry’s performance on “The Dick Cavett Show” or the nude portrait of her and Lennon adorning an album of electronic meanderings.
Yoko Ono and John Lennon met in 1966, and their intense, sometimes complicated relationship lasted until he was killed 14 years later. (Yoko Ono Lennon)
Okay, you say, Ono chose to put herself in that position. But how would Lennon’s delightful scribble drawings have fared if reviewed in Artforum alongside Motherwell, LeWitt and Lichtenstein? This is effectively what Ono contended with as her records were torn apart in Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.
Until now, books on Ono have largely been limited to sketchy histories from a former tarot card reader or a takedown by a dismissed assistant. “Yoko” is the first significant biography of the Japanese-born artist.
Sheff was 24 in 1980 when he scored the assignment of a lifetime: a Playboy interview with John and Yoko on the eve of their comeback record, “Double Fantasy.” The intense, multiday interviews left him with a piece later republished in book form and a lifelong relationship with Ono. They spoke regularly, as friends who turned to each other for help — when Sheff’s son was battling drug addiction, when Ono and the son she had with Lennon, Sean, traveled to California to avoid death threats.
Early on, Sheff worries, out loud, if this friendship might hamper his ability to write this book. “Can a journalist tell the truth about a friend?” To his (and their) credit, Sheff’s book was not read by Ono, now 92 and long retreated from public life, Sean or anyone on their team before its publication.
Sheff is unflinching in describing some of Ono’s questionable judgments, particularly her reliance on psychics and tarot card readers before and after Lennon’s death in 1980. At one point, she subjects young Sean, then just a child, to her beliefs, pushing him to try to communicate with his father’s ghost. Her approach to mothering seems to mirror her own mother’s. It is left to others — nannies, housekeepers and Lennon, when he was alive — to deal with the bulk of the parenting. And Ono’s shopping problems led to a hilarious parody of “Imagine” by their friend Elton John. (“Imagine six apartments. It isn’t hard to do. One is full of fur coats; another’s full of shoes.”)
If Sheff does owe Ono — the Playboy interview she cleared him for did change his career trajectory — he pays her back by using the facts to make a case for her importance in her own right and also as a major influence on the most malleable Beatle.
Would Lennon have become such a committed political activist without Yoko? There were hints, certainly, in Beatles songs like “Revolution” and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” But it’s a leap from writing a song with bite to joining forces with Abbie Hoffman or battling the FBI. With Ono, Lennon embraced primal scream therapy and macrobiotics as well as heroin. He also changed. In 1973, when confronted by Lennon’s drinking and womanizing, Ono cast him out. She assigned a young assistant, May Pang, to serve as his girlfriend and sent them off to Los Angeles. (Yes, not exactly out of the June Cleaver school of marital strategy.) Despite his pleas, Ono resisted reuniting until she felt it right to take him back.
The strength of Sheff’s book is simple journalism, connecting the dots that existed only vaguely before “Yoko.”
We start in the 1930s as young Ono is largely abandoned by her banker father, who heads to the United States for work, and her mother, who is physically around but emotionally distant. We watch the struggle as World War II sets in and Ono must care for her younger brother as they round up food and safe shelter. It is here, as a sister trying to comfort her younger brother, that Ono develops the fantasy world that will guide so much of her art. “Eat this imaginary apple, it will fill you up,” Keisuke, the brother, recounts to Sheff. “It did fill her up — she was good at imagining — but those words didn’t fill me up.”
Eventually, Ono comes to the United States with her family, enrolls at Sarah Lawrence and develops connections to the New York art scene that was emerging in the early 1960s. Sheff opens the book with a detailed description of her performance of “Cut Piece” at Carnegie Hall in 1965. Ono, then 32, sits onstage on the floor with her hair tied back, in silence. The audience is invited to approach with scissors and cut off a piece of her clothing. This piece, performed in Tokyo and London as well, spoke to so many themes that would define her work: the power dynamic between women and men, the impulse of strangers when given permission to approach a passive figure, the role of nakedness in society. In Japan, a man pretends to stab her with the scissors. In London, a group of men, furiously slicing at her clothing, leave her naked onstage. “Vile things were in the air then, so she was challenging those very dark impulses in this vulnerable position — and that was the indelible power of it,” artist Carolee Schneemann later said.
We watch Ono’s emotional collapses and learn of her suicide attempts. Her two marriages before Lennon dissolve and her second husband, Tony Cox, disappears with their daughter for years. (Kyoko, eventually reunited with Ono as an adult, speaks with Sheff.)
Author David Sheff first met Yoko Ono when he was 24 years old. (Bas Bogaerts)
My lone complaint about Sheff’s book is his focus on Ono’s later years. By the time we get to the 1990s, “Yoko” begins to drag and feel more like a curriculum vitae than a narrative. We don’t need to read about every exhibition and long overdue recognition. We’re already there. By now, we get why Ono matters. He also largely skips over her relationship with the surviving Beatles.
Ono, unfairly blamed for breaking them up, reached out to Paul McCartney in the early 1990s and handed him a tape of Lennon’s 1970s demos. These were the songs Lennon sketched out when he was supposedly retired, focused on raising Sean. The tape included “Free as a Bird,” “Real Love” and the song crafted into the final Beatles single, 2023’s “Now and Then.” There is a decent argument to be made that it was Ono, the supposed villain, who was most responsible for their reunion.
If there’s justice in pop music, it is Ono finally receiving co-writing credit in 2017 for “Imagine,” easily Lennon’s most famous song, It was in the initial interview with Sheff in 1980 that Lennon declared how much Ono’s 1964 book, “Grapefruit,” influenced the song: “I wasn’t man enough to let her have credit for it,” he told Sheff.
Thirty-seven years later, Yoko finally got what she deserved.
Geoff Edgers is writing a graphic novel on Lennon and Ono’s relationship that will be published by Abrams Books in 2026