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YOKO ONO
By Caroline RyderPhotos By Michael Lavine
Among Yoko Ono’s many talents, she has an uncanny knack for being misunderstood. She enervated audiences as a singer with the Plastic Ono Band, her high-pitched wails cracking wine glasses everywhere. Her art was ridiculed. Her films, such as Bottoms (a series of close-ups of bare asses) and Smile (which captures John Lennon’s penis achieving an erection in slo-mo), raised the eyebrows of many a critic. As a wife, she was mocked and vilified, blamed for breaking up the biggest band in the world. You’d forgive her for being a little bitter, but today Yoko Ono seems pretty cool about it all. “Being misunderstood is part of life,” she rationalizes. “Not just as an artist, but as a human being and as a woman.”
It seems that Ono, now in her early 70s, simply had to wait a while before the masses were ready to accept her as a legend, as more than just “the world’s most famous widow.” These days, most people accept that John Lennon had talked about leaving the Beatles even before he met Ono. Even those who don’t necessarily like her singing style (it’s not for everyone) acknowledge her influence on punk and new-wave artists from Talking Heads to Sonic Youth to Le Tigre. Contemporary art academics are hailing her as a visionary, more than 40 years since she brought her brand of avant-garde to 1960s Greenwich Village.
Yoko (Japanese for “ocean child”) was born in 1933 in Tokyo, the eldest of three children. Her father was a concert pianist who became a banker, and was so busy working that he didn’t get around to meeting his daughter until she was two years old. During World War II, Yoko and her family had to abandon their comfortable surroundings and flee to the countryside. Temporarily poor, she remained too proud to beg for food. “One day, I didn’t have a lunchbox to take to school,” she recalls. “At lunchtime, the kids all started to unwrap their lunches and eat. One asked why I was not eating lunch. I said I was not hungry.”
When she was 18, Yoko’s father became president of a bank in New York, and the family moved to the wealthy suburb of Scarsdale. In 1958, Ono dropped out of college and eloped with composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. She hooked up with Fluxus, an association of experimental artists in Greenwich Village, and divorced Ichiyanagi in 1962. That same year, she married Anthony Cox, a jazz musician and art promoter who helped finance some of her “interactive conceptual events.” One event, for example, had her asking her audience to pay a shilling to hammer a nail into a board. In another, she invited members of the public to cut off pieces of her clothes until she was nude.
In 1963, Ono and Cox had a daughter, Kyoko, whom Cox “kidnapped” during a weekend visit in 1971, an episode that inspired the Plastic Ono Band’s “Don’t Worry, Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow).” Ono would not see her daughter again until 1998. Losing Kyoko was “the most heartwrenching situation I experienced-until John’s death,” she says.
Yoko’s involvement with Fluxus sparked international interest in her work, and on November 9, 1966, during a preview of her show at the Indica art gallery in London, she met John Lennon. He was especially struck by a piece that required the viewer to climb a small ladder and look through a spy glass, where they would read the word “yes” on a black canvas. “I liked that it was positive,” he said during a series of TV interviews. When asked about her first impression of Lennon, Ono says, “I found him attractive.” Lennon left his wife Cynthia two years later, having apparently kept a copy of Ono’s book Grapefruit by his bed during that period.
The film Imagine chronicles their relationship, including footage of Yoko recalling their first date at his mansion, where they recorded experimental music all night (which would subsequently appear on their Two Virgins album) before consummating their relationship at dawn. And that was the start of one of the most famous love affairs of the 20th century.
They married in March 1969 at the Rock of Gibraltar, with John taking Yoko’s name (John Ono Lennon) and vice versa (Yoko Lennon Ono). On their honeymoon, they set up camp at the Hilton Amsterdam hotel and held a “bed-in for peace,” inviting journalists and TV crews. Many members of the press expected a sordid peep show; what they got was John and Yoko in white pajamas, smoking cigarettes and talking peace. John and Yoko’s relationship fell apart in 1973, partly due to the threat of John being expelled from the U.S. Due to a marijuana conviction. He moved to Los Angeles and entered a period referred to as his “lost weekend.” This time was marked by heavy drinking, affairs, and Lennon notoriously being kicked out of the Troubadour on multiple occasions, once for strapping a sanitary napkin to his head and heckling the Smothers Brothers during a concert. John and Yoko reconciled 18 months later, in 1974. “It was very hard for both of us,” says Ono. “But in hindsight, it was a good experience for me. Without it, I could not have dealt with being alone after John’s death.”
On December 8, 1980, John and Yoko posed for a Rolling Stone magazine cover, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. John was naked, lying in the fetal position and clinging to Yoko, who lay on her back, fully clothed and pensive. A few hours later, a crazed fan shot and killed Lennon as he followed Ono into their Manhattan apartment building.
Still living in the same apartment building, Yoko has continued to make music and art since John’s death. In 2003, a remix of 1980’s “Walking on Thin Ice” hit No. 1 on the U.S. Dance charts, and in 2005 Yoko headlined Arthurfest in Los Angeles, with a backing band that included her son Sean. Artistically, Ono’s near-compulsive dedication to challenging her audience has kept her in the news. Some residents of Liverpool, for instance, were unimpressed when she plastered their city with photographs of breasts and vaginas as part of the city’s Biennial celebration in 2004 (many critics hailed the project, entitled “My Mummy Was Beautiful,” a radical success).
Romantically, she’s been linked to a prominent art dealer, and has been on the dating circuit but never remarried. Financially, she seems to have taken good care of herself since Lennon’s death, telling New York magazine she’s worth “almost as much as Paul McCartney.”
Yoko has also remained an active political campaigner, fighting ageism by wearing hot pants in her 70s, and continuing to champion the hippie notion of love bringing about world peace Ð cute, right? Maybe, until you read how physicists are starting to explore quantum entanglement, and how humans are surrounded by fields that intertwine, meaning that heightened consciousness in one individual can create a domino effect of enlightenment among everyone around them. Who knows? Perhaps she’s onto something after all.