The cover art for Yoko Ono’s Season of Glass could be one of the most famous photos of the 20th century, but somehow isn’t. It shows the glasses pulled off John Lennon’s face after his assassination in December 1980, the left frame opaque with dried blood. Next to them is a glass of water, with a misty view of Central Park in the distance. It was taken in January 1981, from the Dakota building apartment Ono and Lennon shared. When the album was released in February 1981, the cover was widely condemned as in bad taste – almost as bad as making a record so soon after he died (it was her highest-selling record to date).
I’ve been thinking about the photo for a day now, and I’ve noticed telling questions sliding into my mind. Did she save the glasses knowing she would take this shot? Was it real blood? This is the Yoko phenomenon: decades of suspicion, putting Lennon’s lover under the microscope in an attempt to prove she a) broke up the Beatles on purpose, and b) cashed in on Lennon’s death, and has been ever since the ultimate professional widow. Perhaps, in the photo’s composition, is her commentary on her role in the Beatles story: if Lennon was bigger than Jesus, she was the Devil, and here was the holy relic – my piece of him, while you got yours. Downstairs at the Dakota, fans sang Lennon’s songs in a constant vigil, making it hard for her to leave. Maybe she set out to repulse. The photo is exploitative, but it is art. The artist mindset can feel alien – and to everyone apart from Lennon, Ono was an alien too.
The general consensus for years was that Lennon was very funny before he met Ono, and not at all funny afterwards. Was there anything dourer than the scene from which she emerged, organising ten-hour drone parties with La Monte Young in her New York loft? For an idea of how difficult her presence could be, watch her 1972 performance on The Mike Douglas Show of “Memphis Tennessee” with Lennon and Chuck Berry: the screaming stopped only when the engineers pulled the plug on her mic.
The Tate Modern’s retrospective last year revealed a humour she is rarely associated with. Her 1966 film Bottoms played on a loop: 365 pairs of naked cheeks, some very famous, jiggling on a treadmill, filmed at close range. The description said this was Ono’s impression “of the London scene at the time”. A load of arses? Possibly. Bottoms were the true pacifists, she noted, as they were incapable of violence. Her “bagism” was what brought Lennon to one of her shows in 1966 – people climbing into satin bags and jumping about in the purest expression of the spirit. There was a chess set with all-white squares – Play it by Trust – that she sent to Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987. Lennon said that his problem with the avant-garde, before he met Ono, was that it was all so negative.
Her friend David Sheff, author of the famous Playboy interview with the couple conducted shortly before Lennon’s murder, has written a biography in close collaboration with Ono – they are so close, in fact, that he crawled into bed with her and cried when Lennon died. Although Ono has, for two decades, been comfortably rehabilitated as an artist in her own right, Sheff is at pains to recap the misogyny and racism that obscured her story, describing her, at one point, as “the world’s most hated woman”. The usefulness of his blow-by-blow defence (“There. John, not Yoko, broke up the Beatles.”) is that it reminds you of how people behaved towards them. Fans tried to pull her hair out; she received death threats; Beatles staff wouldn’t meet her eye.
Esquire ran a profile with the racist headline “John Rennon’s excrusive gloupie”: the oriental had Lennon under a dangerous spell. It is impossible to imagine, in 2025, the entire culture turning on a popstar’s girlfriend. The problem was never with the Beatles, but with the strength of feeling around them. Three fans committed suicide after Lennon was shot: Ono wrote an open letter in the New York Daily News asking no one else to do it. She is, in one sense, the collateral damage of Beatlemania, a disturbance in the psyche of the world. McCartney sounded more relaxed than fans. “She disturbs the work flow,” he observed. “Who is this, and why is she sitting on my amp?”
Ian Leslie, in his book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, reviewed in these pages last week, puts forward a theory with regards to the relationship that swallowed Lennon up like a whale. Lennon and McCartney had known, respectively, Yoko and Linda for a while before they became the loves of their lives: they threw their lot in with the latter pair at the same moment they tried to finally break free from each other. Lennon saw it as growing up: the old gang was over. It is common for rockstars to get together with second wives who don’t know or care very much about their bands – it is a way of escaping themselves.
Yoko is a lens through which to understand Lennon’s psychology. He called her mother: he’d always been looking for his mum. “Not bad, eh, mother?” he said one November morning in 1980, as he looked at Billboard magazine over breakfast and saw the couple’s album Double Fantasy creeping up the charts. He drew an arrow from number 25 to number one in red pen: “We’re on our way, mother!” He had just turned 40 and was by his own admission excited about the second half of life.
On 8 December Annie Leibovitz took her famous photo which captured their relationship as far as Lennon was concerned: naked, in the foetal position, he gripped Ono’s body: “A portrait of a couple in which the man finally let his guard down after suffering from machismo that nearly killed him,” writes Sheff. But the photo also captures what repelled the public about Ono. While he clung, she looked impassively into the middle distance: it was not her, but the way in which Lennon behaved with her, that rubbed a jealous world up the wrong way. A few hours after the photo was taken he was shot in the back and shoulder five times. As the concierge called an ambulance, the assassin, Mark Chapman, calmly read Catcher in the Rye. It is strange to think he and Ono must have been side by side in the lobby for a time, as they waited for help to arrive.
Ono may have been Lennon’s mother, but she struggled with the maternal instinct. A damaged woman emerges from Sheff’s book – not just withdrawn and cold, but positively screaming with an inner loneliness. Her great-grandfather was Japan’s JP Morgan: her parents only had time for each other. She would ring the servants’ bell for company: her mother instructed the maids not to pick her up if she fell down.
She spent the Second World War in Tokyo as a child, and after the fire-bombing of 1945 the family was forced to beg for food: this interlude, she said, brought out her aggression: back at her boarding school, after the war, one classmate was the future emperor of Japan. She joined her family in New York in 1952, where the avant-garde began to beckon. But her parents were angry and ashamed about her direction – particularly Cut Piece (1964), in which audience members snipped away her clothes on stage. She was estranged from them for much of her life, yet always trying to get their approval. If she exploited her connection to Lennon – as she surely did – she had a deeper need to be recognised.
Ono’s daughter Kyoko, from her marriage to Anthony Cox, recalled a mother more concerned with her art than children. When Kyoko was born in 1963, Ono had already attempted suicide and been institutionalised: when the baby was a few months old she “took her on stage as an instrument – an uncontrollable instrument, you know”, she told Sheff. Kyoko was left with Cox when Ono moved in with Lennon, and after a few visits she disappeared, living for years with her father in a cult. Ono failed to find her: Kyoko only resurfaced in 1998. Lennon put his lawyers on to it at one point, but when they turned up nothing, he and Ono “poured themselves into their work” again. One of the songs that emerged from those sessions was called “Oh Yoko!”
Her second child was Sean Lennon. John was house-husband, while Ono managed the $150m fortune. It was hard for her to find room for children in her relationships with men: “I was still struggling to get my own space in the world.” It was a parental complex of ghastly proportions, and art was a way of getting those fierce feelings out. Ono remains hard to love. But reading this book, I wondered, yet again, at how little thought we gave to people’s psychology in the past.
Only a hundred pages are dedicated to the 45 years of Ono’s life after Lennon. She didn’t leave the Dakota until the pandemic, after 50 years. The real zinger in the Yoko Ono story is that within a few months of Lennon’s death she got together with the couple’s interior designer, moved him into the apartment and stayed with him till 2000. Sam Havadtoy was always kept rather quiet: it didn’t look great for the grieving widow to have paired up with someone else so soon. It’s a common phenomenon, of course – generally among men. Who knows, if I was estranged from my parents, and my husband had been shot, and mad fans lived on my doorstep, and the world blamed me for everything – maybe I’d move my interior designer in too.
Kate Mossman’s “Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters with Rock Royalty” is published on 3 April by Nine Eight
Yoko: A Biography
David Sheff
Simon & Schuster, 384pp, £19
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