THE SUNDAY TIMES
BIOGRAPHY
There would be no Abbey Road or Let It Be without the remarkable 92-year-old artist who actually helped The Beatles stay together longer, argues her friend David Sheff
By
Sunday March 30 2025
When John Lennon heard that the Japanese avant-garde artist Yoko Ono was planning an event in London in November 1966 — people writhing about inside black bags, so he heard — he was immediately interested.
“I thought it was going to be all sex,” he admitted to the journalist David Sheff during an interview in 1980. “Artsy-fartsy orgies. Great! Well, it was far out — but not in the way I thought it was going to be.”
Even within the reality-bending context of life as a Beatle, Lennon’s involvement with Ono would push him very far out indeed. Their 14-year relationship was a profound love story, a febrile artistic partnership, a co-dependent nightmare and a meeting of two traumatised minds.
While that relationship is inescapably at the heart of Yoko: A Biography, Sheff strives to honour his book’s title. By ensuring Ono is centred, he often succeeds in skewing the perspective on tired rock history, upending old narratives about “the woman who broke up the Beatles” with her hovering presence at Lennon’s elbow, strange art and wild vocalisations (inspired by Japanese kabuki).
In fact, Sheff argues, the Beatles might have broken up sooner if the disenchanted Lennon hadn’t been allowed to have the woman he called “the fulfilment of my whole life” with him in the studio. “There’s a version of the Beatles story in which there’d be no Abbey Road or Let It Be without Yoko,” Sheff writes.
A pro-Ono world view is, however, no longer a novelty. Long before Paul McCartney’s explicit 2012 statement that Ono did not wreck the Beatles, her art and music were being vigorously reappraised by fans of the bracingly experimental. Love of Ono has been an article of faith with artists from Sonic Youth and Kurt Cobain to Miley Cyrus, who has an Ono tattoo.
Sheff’s USP, then, is his friendship with Ono, forged in 1980 when he was a 24-year-old journalist working for Playboy. Commissioned to interview the couple — who were making the album Double Fantasy after Lennon’s “house husband” phase bringing up their son, Sean — Sheff was told that access depended on his numerological and astrological charts.
Fortunately, they were auspicious, allowing Sheff — modern celebrity interviewers will howl in envy — to spend three weeks in Lennon and Ono’s company, going dawn-to-dusk with them in studios, restaurants and their apartment in the Dakota in Manhattan. It would be their last big interview before Lennon was assassinated by Mark Chapman on December 8, 1980. Sheff remained close to Ono; it’s telling that Sean granted Sheff hours of interviews, as well as allowing him to reprint lyrics.
Accordingly, the depiction of Ono feels gentle, empathetic, committed to righting undeniable wrongs. Ono is a woman of well-documented contradictions — the clash between her imagine-no-possessions ethos and an investment portfolio that once included a herd of Holstein cows, for example — and while Sheff mentions these, he doesn’t try to unpick them. Nobody could improve on Elton John, anyway, who sent the couple a card mocking their lavish lifestyle: “Imagine six apartments/ It isn’t hard to do/ One is full of fur coats/ Another’s full of shoes.”
Born in Tokyo on February 18, 1933, Ono was the first child of Isoko, the granddaughter of the businessman once thought to be the richest man in Japan, and Eisuke, a thwarted pianist turned bank executive. Her childhood was scarred by trauma: on March 9, 1945, she was left in her bed with a fever during a cataclysmic US air raid while her mother and siblings hid in a bomb shelter.
When the family fled to the country, they were forced to barter possessions for scant food. Her father was often absent; her mother was emotionally distant. From an early age Ono soothed herself by holding her breath or looking at the sky — imagine, in other words.
She briefly studied philosophy before moving to America, enrolling at Sarah Lawrence College, where she dated a boyfriend of Sylvia Plath’s and wrote her first musical score. “Decide on one note that you want to play. Play it with the following accompaniment: the woods from 5am to 8am in summer.”
The book is divided into three sections and it is this richly bohemian pre-Lennon part that is most successful, a sharp reminder that Ono wasn’t dangling in limbo, waiting for a Beatle. She married Toshi Ichiyanagi, a pianist studying at Juilliard, when she was 23; through him she was introduced to New York’s avant-garde scene, befriending John Cage, Merce Cunningham and LaMonte Young.
It was Ono who, in 1960, took the initiative to rent a downtown loft — 112 Chambers Street — where artists performed an influential concert series. Included in her audacious work was the Betty-Friedan-gone-wild Kitchen Piece, where Ono smeared eggs and jelly on a canvas, then set it ablaze. Even as an instigator, though, she was still expected to make the tea.
By the time she met Lennon she had toured Japan with Cage, been admitted to hospital with depression, married her second husband, Tony Cox, and in 1963, gave birth to her and Cox’s daughter, Kyoko. She had also, in 1964, published her cult book Grapefruit, which collated her ethereal instruction pieces into a tangible artefact. “Use your blood to paint,” read Blood Piece from 1960. “Keep painting until you faint (a). Keep painting until you die (b).”
Sheff makes it clear that the spark of her notorious encounter with Lennon at her London exhibition was as much a surprise to her as to him. It’s obvious, though, how their emotional damage dovetailed. Lennon lost his mother as a teenager and was estranged from his father; he and Ono understood abandonment, loneliness and depression. He was also increasingly unhappy with his wife, Cynthia, and in May 1968, after a romantic night of making experimental music together (later released as the album Two Virgins), Ono and Lennon consummated their relationship.
The response from the public and the press was violently disapproving. The abuse Sheff details is shocking: hair-pulling from fans, threats, racist slurs (“John Rennon’s excrusive gloupie” ran an unforgivable headline in Esquire). This hatred provided a malignant background thrum to their complicated lives: periods of heroin use and primal scream therapy, two harrowing miscarriages and, after they moved to New York in 1971, the constant threat of deportation and FBI surveillance.
Sheff also tackles the legend of Lennon’s “Lost Weekend” — 18 months when he and Ono were separated — not by trudging through his well-documented boozy shenanigans, but by examining how Ono used the time to reassert her artistic independence.
They got back together in 1974 and Sean was born in 1975, but the book’s final third, handling the cruel reality of Ono’s life after Lennon’s murder, makes for exhausting, panic-inducing reading. Ono faced death threats and invasions of privacy, some from outside — one intruder abseiled into her bedroom — some from inside the house. Armed guards patrolled her home, but still a trusted employee stole tapes and documents, Lennon’s diaries among them. At times of heightened threat bodyguards placed Sean in a black bag and carried him to school.
Yet, despite the horror and grief, Ono — and her reputation — thrived. She had 13 dance hits in her eighties, while regular museum retrospectives have replaced mockery. Yoko: A Biography is by no means as radical as its formidable subject, but it successfully documents Ono’s remarkable creative resolve and resilience. Her 1997 piece Vertical Memory concluded with the question: “What percentage of my life did I take it lying down?” This book strongly suggests that the answer is zero.
Yoko: A Biography by David Sheff (Simon & Schuster £25 pp376).