Here’s the thing about Yoko Ono, the artist and widow of the murdered rock star John Lennon (usually not identified in that order), and the subject of David Sheff’s new biography. She is funny — ha-ha, not peculiar.
Asked by an interviewer if she’d ever forgive Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman, since Pope John Paul II had visited the jail of his own would-be assassin to offer absolution, Ono replied: “I’m not the pope.”
Promoting an ephemeral Museum of Modern Art “exhibit” in 1971, in part to protest the underrepresentation of women and Asian people there, she posed in front with a strategically placed shopping bag so that the building signage read “Museum of Modern (F) Art.” (This was years before “Family Guy”!)
Elton John recounted in his memoir, “Me,” how he’d wondered why Ono had sold the herd of Holstein cows she’d bought, trying to invest ethically. “All that mooing,” she told him.
For Ono, now 92 and mostly out of the public eye, to have written her own “Me” would have been profoundly out of character. Her art was crowdsourced long before that was a word. “Self-Portrait” was a mirror in a manila envelope that reflected the viewer. She invited audiences to step on a painting, play a form of the child’s game Telephone, climb into a bag, cut off her clothing or otherwise “finish” her visions.
Following Lennon’s death in 1980, trusted intimates flouted confidentiality agreements, stole the couple’s memorabilia and wrote tell-alls that Ono fought hard to suppress. (“Best book I’ll ever burn,” their son, Sean, told one particularly egregious betrayer in court.)
Long racistly reviled as the dragon lady who broke up the Beatles, Ono has enjoyed a reputational spiffing in the 2020s. In the luscious documentary “The Beatles: Get Back,” she is mostly Where’s Waldo-like in the frame, but occasionally wails into the mic as the bandmates jam. There have been retrospectives of her own art, as a participant of the Fluxus movement and beyond, at the Japan Society and Tate Modern.
Sheff is a prolific journalist and author who conducted one of the last significant interviews with John and Yoko, for Playboy, and became good friends with her. His memoir, “Beautiful Boy,” about his son’s methamphetamine addiction, was named with her blessing for one of Lennon’s last songs. Having received her astrological and numerological clearance, he became enough of a regular at the Dakota to see the changing of the slipcovers from denim in winter to white linen in summer.
There have been other biographies of Ono, most recently by the critic Donald Brackett. But with cooperation from her children and brother, her ex-husband Tony Cox, her former partner and decorator Sam Havadtoy, her stepson Julian Lennon, colleagues from the art and music worlds, and such longtime friends as the feminist writer Kate Millett, Sheff’s is the closest to an authorized one the world will get.
The book is predictably sympathetic, but not fawning, mostly written in a straightforward prose, with sentences like “The oppression of women by men was the subject of many of her songs, films, writing and artworks.” And yet sympathy for Ono seems wholly justified. “As a woman she wasn’t just dismissed,” the art dealer Mary Boone tells Sheff. “She was demonized.”
Yoko, meaning “ocean child,” was born in 1933 in Tokyo to wealthy but cold parents. She didn’t meet her father until she was 2½, and her mother was vain and germophobic. “Even now I find it unpleasant to sit on a cushion or chair that still retains the temperature of somebody who had just been sitting there,” Ono once wrote.
At 12, she watched bombs falling on Tokyo; after evacuation to the countryside she had to beg and barter for food, take care of her siblings and suffer through pleurisy and other ailments. There would be suicide attempts and time in a mental hospital.
After the war, Ono dropped out from both a philosophy program at Gakushuin University and the boho Sarah Lawrence College. The journalist Betty Rollin, a classmate there, found her “someone without mooring, drifting, lost and striving.” Ono’s finishing school would be Greenwich Village; her musical god not Elvis Presley but John Cage.
She married twice before Lennon, to Toshi Ichiyanagi, a Juilliard pianist, and Cox, an art promoter who fathered her daughter, Kyoko, whom she took onstage as a baby “as an instrument — an uncontrollable instrument, you know,” and from whom she was long estranged. Many of her artistic experiments now seem prescient, like offering shares of herself at $250 each. Long before Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall, she made “Apple,” a piece of fresh fruit on a stand at the Indica gallery in London. (Lennon, naughtily and biblically, took a chomp.)
I am not an Ono-phile who wants to wallow overmuch in this kind of art, but applaud Sheff’s book as an important corrective to years of bad P.R. He’s done the opposite of a hatchet job, putting his subject back together branch by branch, like a forester. (Climbing trees is a big theme in her work.)
He argues convincingly for her as survivor, feminist, avant-gardist, political activist and world-class sass. When people criticized her for licensing “Instant Karma” to Nike in 1987, she retorted, “I got $800,000 which went to the United Negro College Fund. … You have a problem with that?”
The internet, in particular, seemed built for Ono’s participatory visions. When Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, she tweeted a 19-second audio clip of herself screaming.
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