“YOKO even met a Beatle,” Dan Richter, an actor, informed fellow actor, Tony Cox, about what had occurred on the eventide of November 7, 1966 whilst the “Japanese-born American artist Yoko Ono” was putting the finishing touches to her exhibition, Unfinished Paintings and Objects by Yoko Ono –at Indica Gallery in London.
The ‘Beatle’ mentioned in the chinwag was none other than the Liverpool-born rock star John Lennon, who’d been invited to the show by John Dunbar, a friend to another ‘Beatle’, viz Paul McCartney. (Upon learning of the identity of the ‘Beatle’ who’d visited Ono’s exhibition, Cox – who was Ono’s spouse, father to her daughter Kyoko, as well as her assistant in her avant-garde art endeavours – encouraged her to pursue Lennon as a patron.)
Lennon’s appearance on the eve of the exhibition’s opening had peeved Ono, and when he took a bite of an apple which comprised part of her presentation it vexed her further. Though chagrined by the musician’s conduct, the artist was also captivated by his pluck – a moment Lennon would describe as: “. . . when we really met. That’s when we locked eyes and she got it and I got it.”
At the time, other than having heard about “the Fab Four” in passing and in addition to knowing the name Ringo “because ‘ringo’ is ‘apple’ in Japanese”, Ono incredulously didn’t grasp that the English rock band were a big deal, or that Lennon was already one of the most famous and recognized humans who had ever lived!
Mention of the actual sequence of Ono and Lennon’s rendezvous is important for context since she’d historically been portrayed by accusers as something of an evil witch who stalked him – instead of, in Dunbar’s assertion, being: “just this girl John fell in love with.”
If anything, Ono maintains that by the time she met Lennon at Indica, she was too busy to think about men – although Lennon “had a charge, a force and I felt that,” she’d concede.
Although their connection would subsequently grow around their respective work, according to his then wife Cynthia, the Beatle had initially made fun of Ono when she had the London showing of her film No. 4 (which consisted solely of close-ups of 365 pairs of wobbling naked buttocks) – with him surmising that “she must be off her rocker.” Ono’s other half to-be, Lennon was the progeny of a merchant seaman father who was absent for most of his life and a mother who abandoned him in childhood and would be killed in an automobile incident when the future rock star was only 17 – an anguish he’d later express, as a solo artist, in his song “Mother” (from the album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band), in which he screamed out for his parents: “Mommy, don’t go, daddy, come home!”
Ono had been born in Tokyo on February 18, 1933, two weeks after her father Eisuke had left his wife Isoko – who at the time was pregnant with her – behind to move to the United States to oversee the branch of a Japanese bank in San Francisco.
Up until he sent for his wife and daughter to join him in the US in 1935, Ono knew him only as a photograph her mother instructed her to bid “goodnight to father” to, before she went to bed, as a little girl.
Ono’s mother was progeny of one of the foremost wealthiest families in Japan, viz the Yasudas (Zenjiro Yasuda, once regarded as the richest man in Japan, happened to be her grandfather) – whilst her father’s family traces its roots back to a samurai whose US-educated son became president of the Industrial Bank of Japan, a career designation Eisuke would eventually emulate.
(Ono says that Isoko used to inform her: “Your father was only president of a bank, but my father owned one.”) If Isoko was a beautiful moga (modern girl) who “didn’t really want to admit that she was a mother” and was hands-off in her upbringing – then Eisuke was an aloof father who’d have Ono perform on the piano alone at parties under his unflinching eye, causing her to never once feel as if she had pleased him.
Raised in Japan and America, although surrounded by material privilege as a child, Ono felt alienated in both the East and the West, with two of her earlier childhood memories comprising her family, when she was 8, having to abruptly leave the US amidst a groundswell of racism, to return to Japan in February 1941 ahead of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, and the period the following year when over a hundred thousand Japanese Americans were forced from their homes and interned in ‘relocation centers’, on one side of the Pacific Ocean – and experiencing, aged 12, the trauma of the US bombing Tokyo on the night of March 9, 1945 which killed around one hundred thousand fellow Japanese (a horror which would result in Isoko evacuating her children, who now included a younger brother and sister to Ono, to a farming village in Nagano Prefecture where – under much hardship and discrimination from locals – the family would remain until their return, after an armistice, to a Tokyo reduced to ruin), on the other.
Once described by Lennon as the world’s most famous unknown artist, Ono’s performance art included incendiary feminist art such as, ‘Cut Piece’, in which she sat in seiza (deference sitting position in Japan) posture on a stage whilst the audience was invited over one at a time to cut off a-piece of her clothing. (Her performance invoked mixed reactions across the world with several young men cutting off large parts of her skirt and sweater to reveal her bra pending its New York staging in March 1964; a man miming stabbing her at its staging in Kyoto in 1964; and a group of predatory men rushing onto the stage and within minutes cutting off her underclothes to leave her naked at its London staging in 1965.)
Once one of the world’s most hated women, Ono’s vilification manifested through racist and sexist slurs the press, fans and the Beatles’ circle spewed her way, which included being: accused of breaking up the best-selling musicians of all time (i.e., the Beatles – who once felt nettled by the sight of her lying on a bed adjacent to a studio the band was busy recording its Abbey Road album in, with Lennon at some stage allegedly handing her a packet of heroin during the session); the “strange Oriental woman” that the “wondrous mystic prince from the rock ‘n’ roll world” (Lennon) dabbled with; called an “ugly Jap”; yelled at by Beatles fans to go back to her own country, et cetera.
In the aftermath of Lennon’s demise, Ono would be betrayed, robbed, blackmailed and her life threatened.
“The song ‘Imagine’ could never have been written without her,” Lennon would declare whilst Ono opined: “I feel in the big picture the fact that John and I met was to do this song.” ‘Imagine’ and ‘Give Peace a Chance’ emanated from her art and thinking – whilst her philosophies about art and activism (such as the famous Bed-ins for Peace) were the basis of she and Lennon’s campaigns for peace.
They were the world’s most famous peaceniks rallying against the Vietnam War. (In November 1969, Lennon even returned an MBE medal Queen Elizabeth II had bestowed upon him – together with the other Beatles – in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Biafra War in Nigeria.)
Now aged 92, Ono has transcended identities and epochs which inter alia, include producing thirteen No.1 dance hits as a recording musician in her own cognizance, and raising awareness for assorted maladies bedevilling an unsafe planet.
Author David Sheff’s tome, to borrow from another Beatle, is also a magical mystery tour through remarkable times and places.
Because of his enduring friendship with Ono – which harks back to September 1980 when, as a 24-year-old fledgling journalist, he was sent to interview her and John Lennon for Playboy magazine – Sheff decided to write Ono’s biography through not varnishing the truth to depict her as either a saint or a sinner, but rather by accurate reconstruction of events, dialogue and reportage of what actually occurred.
A trade paperback, Yoko is published by Simon & Schuster UK and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R440.
