A fuller portrait of artist-provocateur Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono has long been accused of breaking up the Beatles, but David Sheff offers a different perspective in “Yoko,” his compelling biography of the artist, musician, activist, and, most famously, widow of John Lennon. 

Ono’s ubiquitous presence at the band’s final recording sessions in 1969 has been characterized as intrusive, inappropriate, and downright weird. But Sheff points out that a miserable and exhausted Lennon was already determined to leave the band, and he theorizes that Lennon was able to make it through the sessions precisely because Ono was at his side. 

“There’s a version of the Beatles story in which there’d be no Let It Be or Abbey Road without Yoko,” he ventures, adding that “Instead of being blamed and pilloried for breaking up the group, maybe Yoko should be thanked for keeping the band together during that fertile period.”

That conclusion is in keeping with the book’s sympathetic portrayal of Ono, a longtime friend of the author. As a young journalist, Sheff conducted the last joint interview with Lennon and Ono, for Playboy magazine, spending three weeks with them in New York City in August and September 1980. When Lennon was murdered months later, Sheff became, he writes, “one of the people who circled the wagons around [Ono] as she struggled to survive a period she would later describe as the season of glass, when she was as fragile as glass and almost shattered.” 

Ono is now 92 years old, and it’s jarring to consider that she was with Lennon for only 14 years of her long life. “Yoko” is divided into three parts – essentially before, during, and after Lennon. The first section charts her unhappy early years. She was born to wealthy but distant parents in Tokyo in 1933, and her childhood was lonely and marked by the trauma of World War II. She used her imagination to mentally escape the fear and deprivation wrought by the war, soothing her younger brother with detailed descriptions of food they wished they could eat. She traces her career as a conceptual artist back to that survival technique. 

When Ono and Lennon met in 1966, both were in unhappy marriages. Ono was well known in avant-garde circles for performance art like “Cut Piece,” during which she invited audience members onto the stage to wield scissors and slice off pieces of her clothing. She wasn’t expecting mainstream approval: Sheff notes that she didn’t regard a performance as successful “unless half the audience walked out.” 

Lennon, meanwhile, was by then one of the most famous people in the world. They fell in love, divorced their spouses, and married in 1969. Their honeymoon was a weeklong “bed-in” to protest the Vietnam War, during which they held court from their bed in an Amsterdam hotel room, talking to journalists and visitors about peace.

As a musician, Ono was known for singing in what has been described as a screechy, caterwauling voice, and many of her musical collaborations with Lennon were baffling to Beatles fans. But their most impactful joint production, the indelible “Imagine,” had wide appeal. The song became Lennon’s bestselling recording as a solo artist, even as Ono’s role in inspiring and writing it was initially uncredited. “I wasn’t man enough to let her have credit for it,” Lennon confessed to Sheff during their 1980 interview.

Sheff, the author of the memoir “Beautiful Boy,” covers the dark moments in the couple’s relationship, including their heroin use and, later, an 18-month separation, which Lennon called his “lost weekend.” Lennon begged her to take him back, but Ono needed the time apart. “Can you imagine every day of getting this vibration from people of hate? You want to get out of that,” she remarked. 

Like other commentators, Sheff notes that racism and sexism played a big part in Ono’s widespread vilification. The late feminist writer Kate Millett, who was friends with Ono, said, “She got in people’s faces and screamed. People didn’t like a person from Japan screaming, and they didn’t like a woman screaming. A screaming Japanese woman enraged them.” Ono received death threats for years after Lennon was killed.

The author is frank about Ono’s shortcomings as a parent. Her daughter from an earlier marriage, Kyoko, tells Sheff that her mother was more interested in Lennon and in her work than in her. The two were out of contact for many years. Ono’s son with Lennon, Sean, expresses a similar sentiment, saying he’d sometimes wished for a mother “less involved with her own life and art and more attuned to me.” Ono herself admitted that she had trouble being around her young son in the period following Lennon’s death.

Sheff’s access to those close to Ono makes “Yoko” an intimate read. (The author reports that he and Ono drifted apart, but he doesn’t say why.) Ono’s cultural influence has been newly appreciated in recent years – with institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern mounting retrospectives and musicians including Lady Gaga and David Byrne citing her as an inspiration – but it is Sean Ono Lennon who offers the most poignant appraisal of her legacy. 

He describes her use of imagination to survive the trauma of World War II and to fuel her art, including, with Lennon, the song “Imagine,” an internationally recognized hymn for peace. 

“She has this ability to overcome difficulty with positive thinking,” he tells Sheff of his mother. “She really wanted to teach the world to do that. She taught my dad to do that. It’s not going to stop a moving train or a bullet. But I think there’s something profound about it. And I think it affected the world.”