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Yoko Ono Gets Solo Bio
By BOB RUGGIERO
Houston Press
MARCH 6, 2025
Of the thousands of books written by or about the Beatles and seemingly everyone in their orbit, it’s astonishing to think there have been only a handful on someone so close to epicenter: Yoko Ono.
Lennon and the Beatles of course are players in David Sheff’s Yoko: The Biography (384 pp., $30, Simon & Schuster). But he keeps the focus mostly on Ono and her own life and career as an visual/music/film artist, activist and collaborator.
Sheff does a solid job delving into Ono’s life and career prior to entering the Beatles orbit. This includes her privileged upbringing in a wealthy and well-known Japanese banking family, relations with two cold and distant parents, two pre-Lennon marriages, and early attempts at staging art happenings that clearly put her on the edge of the avant garde.
Book cover
In probably her most famous one, Cut Piece, a placid Ono sat on stage in a dress and had audience members come up and clip away pieces of her clothing. That some men crossed a line (one pretending to stab Ono with the scissors) or tittering with sexual malice spoke volumes.
In Kitchen Piece, Ono threw eggs and jello on a canvas, smeared it, and lit it on fire—which critics saw as a comment on what was expected of women and their roles in society.
Some of Ono’s works were simple instructions for people to think, breathe, or move a certain way. In Audience Piece, a couple dozen actors stood on the edge of a stage, wordlessly glaring at the audience, who glared back. Some people left immediately. Others stayed for…4-5 hours. Hey, it was the ‘60s.
At the time, some thought it was way out there. But the decades since have improved both her standing and reputation in the art world.
Then it’s where most books pick up her story: The initial meeting with Lennon during a fall 1966 one-woman art show at the Indica Gallery. That’ where Lennon famously ate part of an apple that was part of an exhibit. And climbed to the top of a ladder to peer through a spyglass to read the word “Yes” on the ceiling.
The pair felt an instant connection, and flirted on-and-off while both were still married. But when Cynthia Lennon came home one morning from vacation to her marital home to find Ono calmly sitting at her kitchen table (not, according to Sheff, clad only in Cynthia’s robe per some Beatle Lore), it was JohnandYoko (one word, please) from then on.
Was it annoying and unprecedented that Ono, stuck to Lennon’s side, sat in on Beatles recording sessions and offered advice (including, after a miscarriage, prone on a full hospital bed)? Yes. Did Ono alone “break up” the Beatles? No. Tensions were already high within the group, and in Ono, Lennon found an exciting new partner that broadened his horizons well beyond just music.
Though the music that they did create together (often featuring Ono’s piercing and continual screams) was not really going to hit the charts. Not that either of them even cared about the commerciality of what they were doing. Or what Chuck Berry thought in a now-famous meme of his pop-eyed, uncomprehending face while jamming with the duo on The Mike Douglas Show.
Ono bore the brunt of the hatred, racism and misogyny directed at her about the marriage, things that seem unfathomable in 2025. Sheff details the highs of her love affair with Lennon, but also the lows: heroin addiction, multiple miscarriages, threats of deportation, Lennon’s drunken “Lost Weekend” that lasted 18 months.
As a biographer, Sheff in some parts is less than subjective. He’s a journalist who had in-depth, on the record talks with Lennon and Ono. But after Lennon’s 1980 assassination, he became a close, personal friend to his widow, spending thousands of hours together.
As a result, he’s more subjective and defensive of Ono, at times even a cheerleader. Or makes grand pronouncements (was John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band really “one of the best rock-and-roll records ever made?”)
He also breaks ground with insightful and in-depth observations and remembrances from Ono’s children, Sean (with Lennon) and Kyoko (with second husband Tony Cox). Kyoko’s input is especially valuable given that she basically disappeared from Ono’s life for more than two decades while Cox “kidnapped” her into isolation and a religious cult.
Houston plays a small part in the location of a December 1971 hearing that granted visitation rights to John and Yoko (Cox’s then-wife was a Houstonian), but from which Cox fled with his daughter, not to be seen or heard from for a long while. The book even namechecks the Houston Press for a 2013 article titled “Yoko Ono Turns 80, Still Weird as Hell.”
Probably the book’s most revelatory section is also its shortest, the 45 years of Ono’s life post-1980 and Lennon’s assassination (something shared with Ono assistant/friend Eliot Mintz’s recent memoir We All Shine On). It probably gives the most detailed look at her daily life and struggles, work to burnish Lennon’s legacy, reemergence as an artist, and positive hindsight reevaluation of her work.
Disturbingly, Sheff details a shocking amount of death threats to the grieving widow (and to Sean) and potential assassination attempts she endured in the years right after John’s killing. The sickest drawings and missives would pour into her Dakota mailbox (including a bullet-ridden cover of the couple’s 1980 comeback album Double Fantasy) with vague proclamations of coming to “finish the job.”
Sheff does get some comments from the “mysterious” Sam Havadtoy, Yoko’s interior designer-turned-live-in-boyfriend and business adviser for nearly 20 years after Lennon’s killing. Rarely seen or mentioned (and imagine that status in life), it seems that to bring him out would jeopardize Ono’s public persona as Beatle Widow.
Well into her 70s and 80s she continued to stage both retrospective exhibitions, create new art, find unlikely success in dance clubs with remixes of her music, and even go on a concert tour with Sean beside her onstage. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Questlove, Michael Stipe, Rufus Wainwright, and other contemporary musicians sang her praises.
Now at age 92, Yoko Ono—even if her work is absolutely not to everyone’s taste—has by now firmly established her own cred, and not just as an adjunct to one of the world’s most famous and beloved musicians. Yoko more than gives this “Ocean Child” (the literal Japanese translation of her name) her just due.
