What can Meghan learn from the redemption of Yoko Ono?
Both women were little-known and said to have ‘stolen’ one of Britain’s much-loved sons. Now, on the eve of the Beatle widow’s 90th birthday...
HALF a century ago, Yoko Ono was probably the most vilified woman in the world. Believed by many to have been responsible for the break-up of The Beatles, she had, it was thought, ruined everything. A strange, zany, Japanese, arty woman in black, coming over here and bewitching John Lennon away from his wife and friends. Life without The Beatles would never be the same.
But it was. The world moved on. Yoko survived, and next month she will celebrate her 90th birthday, no longer despised, worth half a billion dollars, according to some, and now, in fact, rather admired.
So who is this woman, whose story some now compare to that of Meghan Markle? There are, after all, striking parallels to the story of the little-known actress who came to Britain to find her prince, married him, was quickly unhappy with British life and returned to the US, taking her husband with her.
When Yoko contrived to meet Lennon, she was an avant-garde artist whose events in New York had rarely attracted more than a couple of dozen admirers. What she wanted – and would always want – was to be appreciated on the world stage.
Lennon provided that stage and more.
I’m not qualified to judge Yoko’s art. But for several years, I knew Yoko very well and never met anyone so convinced of her creative talent, so single-minded in her quest for recognition.
To achieve this, she approached Lennon and he became her enthusiastic chief enabler.
What their love affair did for his talent is still being appraised. What it did for his working relationship with his songwriting partner Paul McCartney was quickly evident. It broke it up. McCartney found he was unable to write with Lennon in the presence of Yoko. From then on, both songwriters pursued separate careers.
But while many fans blamed Yoko for her part in destroying The Beatles, Lennon never did.
He may not have been physically faithful to her during the next, and last, decade of his life – nor, it is believed, was she to him. But from the moment he left The Beatles in 1969 to the night in New York in 1980 when he was shot dead by a mad fan, he never publicly criticised her.
In fact, quite the reverse.
A few weeks before his death, he claimed that his most famous song, Imagine, should also have been credited to Yoko because he got the idea for it from an ‘instruction’ she’d composed as an avant-garde artist in 1963.
‘Imagine letting a goldfish swim across the sky,’ she’d written, which, eight years later, Lennon turned into ‘Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try…’
TO YOKO and some of her supporters, that gave her the right to claim co-authorship of Lennon’s anthem. Others have pointed out that if that were the case, Ringo Starr could claim a half-credit for writing A Hard Day’s Night, since Lennon and McCartney had turned the drummer’s muddled phrase into a very famous song and film title.
Ringo didn’t claim anything, of course; nor were the publishers of Imagine convinced by Yoko’s claim.
I first met and interviewed her at Abbey Road Studios in North London in 1968, during the recording of The Beatles’ White Album. Lennon was 27, Yoko 35, and had been living with him for some months, having moved into his Surrey home while his wife Cynthia was on holiday.
At that meeting, and subsequently over many years, I found her to be enigmatic in that she never displayed her inner feelings. When things weren’t going right, she just went blank… in public, anyway.
Once, when staying with the Lennons in a New York hotel, I watched, embarrassed, as John shouted ferociously at her and told her she ‘looked like a whore’ because he thought her clothes inappropriate.
Silently, she kept her composure and changed into something more demure. If he was to get a roasting from her, it would be in private.
She always thought that whatever she did was equal to anything he did, though he sold millions of records and she hardly any.
When she insisted on equal space on what would become his last album, he gave in, despite it not being what he wanted and he knew it would badly damage the record’s sales. She was a tough and unbending negotiator.
Born in Tokyo in 1933, into a wealthy banking family, the weight of Japanese conformity was all around. But, evidently, that didn’t extend to sex.
As she grew up, she realised her parents had an open marriage and both took lovers who she would get to know. It wasn’t unusual to her and she would later display a guilt-free attitude towards extramarital sex, too.
When she was 20, her father was posted to the US and she enrolled at a private, liberal arts college from which she dropped out and married a young Japanese composer. The couple held ‘events’ in their loft apartment. Yoko’s art was influenced by an avant-garde group whose leader became her lover. There were, she told me at our first meeting, other affairs. There were abortions, too.
Artistically, she saw herself as a conceptualist, dreaming up instructions for her pieces, which others might perform.
In 1961, her marriage broke up and she returned to Japan, where she was put into an asylum by her family after taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
She was rescued by an American film-maker called Tony Cox, whom she married, and they had a daughter, Kyoko. Motherhood didn’t come naturally to Yoko, so Cox did most of the caring as she pursued her career.
Back in New York, she appeared alone on stage in a little black dress holding a large pair of scissors which she gave to members of the audience, inviting them to cut off one piece of her clothing at a time. Soon, she was down to her pants.
There were, however, no reviews in newspapers. A film she made of famous people’s bottoms received some notoriety, but no serious appraisal.
At which point, she was invited to a symposium in London entitled Destruction In Art. It was 1966 and London was the centre of the Swinging Sixties. It was, she decided, the place for her to finally be noticed and taken seriously.
And who better to be associated with than The Beatles?
She tried McCartney first. He didn’t want to know. So she approached Ringo. He didn’t understand what she was talking about. Lennon, however, was interested.
They met several times. She wrote him tantalising messages when The Beatles went to India to study meditation. Then while Lennon’s wife Cynthia was away, he invited Yoko to his house. When
When May wanted to stop as his mistress, Yoko insisted she continue
Cynthia returned, she found Yoko had replaced her.
From that moment, Lennon and Yoko became inseparable.
No longer interested in being a Beatle, Lennon became one half