Setting the record straight

Winnipeg Free Press

17-05-2025

This competent celebrity biography has been designed and executed largely as a work of advocacy.
If any living celebrity deserves such treatment, it might be Japanese-American artist and activist Yoko Ono, given the mountains of abuse, much of it sexist and racist, she has endured over her long life.
Now 92 and largely absent from the public glare, Ono will be forever remembered as the widow of Beatle John Lennon and the woman blamed in the popular imagination for the breakup of the 20th century's most enduring pop group.
STEVE SANDS / ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES
In this August 1980 photo, Lennon and Ono arrive at recording studio The Hit Factory, less than four months before Lennon was murdered.
This accusation has been refuted many times by people close to the Beatles, even by its other members.
But American journalist and author David Sheff puts the charge firmly to rest by assembling much evidence that Lennon was on his way out the door from the Fab Four by the time he met Ono at her Manhattan art exhibition in 1966. In her highbrow circles, remember, the Beatles were nowhere men.
'It's possible the band stayed together longer than they would have because of Yoko,' Sheff writes.
'She accompanied John — literally holding his hand sometimes — to the sessions that resulted in the final Beatles albums.… John was miserable then. If Yoko hadn't agreed to stay by his side, he might have left earlier.'
Sheff, 69, has been Ono's friend since he interviewed her and Lennon for Playboy magazine shortly before Lennon's assassination on Dec. 8, 1980.
Ono gave Sheff permission to use Lennon's song Beautiful Boy as the title of his gruelling memoir of his son Nic's meth addiction. That 2008 book earned rave reviews and was adapted into a 2018 movie starring Steve Carrell and Timothée Chalamet.
Yoko is not the only full biography of Ono, but it is the first one to be given co-operation from people close to her, including son Sean and his older half-sister Kyoko.
The result is a well-rounded though routine portrait of an artist, not entirely flattering but always sympathetic. It depicts her as a pioneering feminist and social activist, a ground-breaking conceptual artist and musician, and a resilient person whose life has been rife with adversity.
Ono was born in 1933 into the wealthiest circle of Japan's aristocracy. But her parents were cold and distant. She did not meet her father, an international banker, until she was two-and-a-half years old, when her heiress mother took her to live with him in the U.S.
LOUIS LANZANO / ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES
Ono, seen in New York in 2000.
She was back in Tokyo during the Second World War to witness the city's bombing. She and her younger brother were sent to the country for safe keeping, where they often went hungry. As a teen, she attempted suicide more than once.
Sheff shows how these seminal experiences gave rise to her fierce anti-war sentiments, culminating perhaps in her and John's famous bed-in for peace in Montreal in 1969.
She left Japan in 1952 to enrol at New York's chic women's liberal arts college Sarah Lawrence. While there she discovered her artistic calling, eventually becoming an integral part of New York's avant-garde Fluxus art movement.
She married her first husband, a Japanese modern composer, in 1956, divorcing him within in a couple years. She also married a second time, to an American, and had her daughter, Kyoko, by him. That marriage also faltered. Ono's relentless focus on her work and, later, drug-taking with Lennon, resulted in a long period of estrangement from Kyoko.
Ono's conceptual art was noted for its intentional ephemerality and for its focus on audience participation. Sheff convincingly shows how her signature 'instruction pieces' align with her contribution to the lyrics of Lennon's classic 1971 song Imagine.
Her 14 years with Lennon comprise less than one-sixth of her life, but make up almost half the book. Despite their different backgrounds, Sheff notes, they bonded over childhood feelings of loneliness and parental rejection.
To emphasize who wore the pants (and managed the money) in the relationship, Sheff always groups them as 'Yoko and John,' never 'John and Yoko.'
Sheff acknowledges Ono is far from perfect. She could be imperious with employees. She was as distracted a mother as her own mother was. She was often duped by the psychics and numerologists she consulted all her life, many of them outright con men.
For Sean's birthday party in 1984, she invited a raft of New York celebrities — just what every nine year-old wants.
Yoko: A Biography
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Within a year of Lennon's death, she had a new live-in lover, the couple's former interior designer, 19 years her junior. She kept him under wraps for almost 20 years before changing the locks on her Dakota Apartments suite when he was out of town.
Yet she kept on trucking. In her 70s and 80s, Ono's artistic and musical reputation grew, and she was regularly feted with retrospectives. The Vancouver Art Gallery played host to a big one, Growing Freedom, in 2022.
That she has reached her 90s, given decades of smoking — Sheff does not report if she has quit — must be a testament to good, if not instant, karma.
At this point, to paraphrase Imagine, above her is only sky.
Morley Walker is a retired Free Press editor and writer.