As John Lennon’s biographer, I felt duty bound to see his widow Yoko Ono’s exhibition, Music Of the Mind, at Tate Modern. But I can’t say I was looking forward to it.
During the three years I spent on the John book with Yoko’s full co-operation, I thought I came to know and understand her - only to discover very painfully that neither was even remotely true. Two decades on, the memory of our final meeting in the Dakota Building, and of those two lawyers she used as a battering-ram, can still wake me in the small hours in a muck sweat.
Knowing as much as I do about Yoko’s art and life, I found many of the exhibits in Music of the Mind felt rather like old if not exactly dear friends.
Here on film was ‘Cut Piece’, her performance art event in 1964 when she sat silent and motionless on a stage as audience-members scissored off strips of her clothes to symbolise female subservience in that pre-feminist era.
Here was her film ‘Bottoms’, showing various sets of buttocks in walking mode (some spottier than I remembered from previous viewings) and photographs of the day she and a group of hippie helpers wrapped Trafalgar Square’s stone lions in white canvas.
Here were the halves of domestic objects like chairs and clocks and teacups, giving new meaning to ‘half a cup of tea’; here a replica of the stepladder to a tiny card saying breathe that John climbed up to read in 1966 and never really came down again.
The novelty for me was comparing the derision which greeted these and other Yoko creations at their first unveiling with the reverence accorded to Music Of The Mind, a sell-out since it opened in February and predicted to remain so until it ends in September.
At times I felt like approaching one or other enraptured group of attendees (young people, especially women, very much the majority) and recalling how when I first met Yoko in the summer of 1969, she was Britain’s most hated woman.
Back then, I knew no more than anyone else about this Japanese-American seven years older than John who’d caused him to leave his wife and infant son and estranged him from his fellow Beatles, in particular his creative soul-mate Paul McCartney.
In the mid-1960s when few British people had heard of conceptual art, Yoko’s buttock-filming and statue-swathing were seen merely as egotistical publicity stunts. No one could have conceived of her destiny as rock ‘n’ roll’s most tragic widow, still less that in the 1990s she’d become a heroine to the shock-art generation headed by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
That summer of ’69, I’d been assigned by the Sunday Times Magazine to write a fly-on-the-wall story about the Beatles’ Apple company and as part of it was allowed to spend a morning as an observer in John and Yoko’s office.
The couple were sharing the same antique desk, as if superglued together. John’s once mocking, mischievous face had been solemnised by shoulder-length hair and a beard like an Old Testament prophet; Yoko, in a purple robe, was alternately spooning brown rice from a wooden bowl and caviar from a Fortnum & Mason jar.
They were already cerebral as well as sexual partners, combining John’s vast fame with Yoko’s provocative performance art to promote world peace. For him it was a trailblazing departure from rock-star egotism and materialism, yet condemned by the world’s media as preposterously naïve
I sat discreetly in a corner, next to one of the perspex figures from their Plastic Ono Band, a robotic ensemble which already meant more to John than the flesh-and-blood, and now fractious, Fab Four.
Upside-down in the Georgian fireplace was a naked plastic doll, a survivor of the several dozen he and Yoko had recently incinerated with Napalm in Chelsea’s King’s Road as a protest against the Vietnam War.
The previous evening at the Institute For Contemporary Arts they’d premiered their film, Self-Portrait, a lengthy close-up of John’s penis in partial, then full erection. There had been no press reviews of the exposed organ or, as Yoko innocently said, ‘The critics wouldn’t touch it.’
By contrast, the critics had savaged their Bed-In the previous March when they’d spent a week in bed at a luxury hotel in Amsterdam as a ‘happening’, a honeymoon and a reiteration of their peace message to hundreds of clicking or whirring cameras.
‘Clowns and con-artists’, the papers proclaimed in one voice. (Yet in 1999 when Tracey Emin’s unmade bed went on show, it was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and hailed as a work of genius.)
Their Apple office was like a walk-in clinic for all the world’s ills where a constant stream of visitors came seeking their support for causes ranging from exploited grape-pickers in southern California to a petition to exonerate and pardon James Hanratty, one of the last people Britain hanged for murder.
Everyone received a hearing and no one ever left disappointed, least of all the journalists who flocked there for quotes from the wittiest Beatle that even apostolic whiskers couldn’t bury.
Otherwise, Yoko seemed to have taken control of John like a one-person cult. Not content with intruding on the Beatles’ previously closed recording-sessions at Abbey Road studios, she’d allegedly even followed him into the gents’ toilet.
The blame for having broken up history’s greatest pop band was inevitably to fall on her, even though the real cause of the breakup was plainly visible at the time.
It was John’s and Paul’s bitter dispute over the hiring of the Beatles’ last manager, Allen Klein, respectively for and against, which destroyed the unity that had sustained all four throughout the most punishing years of their career.
As a result, Paul had forsaken Apple, where he’d effectively been CEO, remaining out of sight for so long on his farm in the remote Scottish Highlands that a rumour swept around the world that he was dead.
Hence John’s freedom to divert the company from its original mission of promoting young talent to one of promoting his and Yoko’s projects with himself in the role of her disciple.
John was a mass of insecurities that limitless fame and audience-love couldn’t mitigate. For all his shining talent, he’d yearned to be a ‘real’ artist, like Yoko, never thinking that songs like ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘A Day In The Life’ more than qualified him as such.
Although a born rebel, he had been trapped for years in the Beatles’ collective image of adorable mop-tops, forced to be polite to the kind of authority figures he most detested.
Yoko by contrast didn’t care a damn what anyone thought of her work or of her. Now she told him that he could do everything she did in the outrage line with the same fearlessness.
She didn’t break up the Beatles, only showed him he could have a meaningful and productive life without them. And so it proved.
Once married to John, Yoko became his collaborator and co-producer on a succession of albums, most notoriously ‘Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins’ whose cover showed the two far-from-virgins as full-frontal nudes with a rear-view on its reverse.
The Beatles’ record company, EMI, disowned the album and its distributors for smaller labels in the UK and US would handle it only inside a plain brown wrapper, the recognised packaging for porn.
Then, in 1971, came ‘Imagine’ whose title-track – inspired by Yoko’s one-word ‘instructional poems’ – would become the world’s favourite secular hymn.
That same year, to escape the racism hurled at her by the British press and possible reprisals from Beatles fans mourning the breakup, they moved to New York, her home town.
John became deeply involved with her in America’s militant anti-war, civil rights and Black Power movements and, at Yoko’s prompting, even nascent feminism.
The paranoid Nixon administration labelled him a ‘subversive’, he was put under surveillance by both the FBI and CIA and the immigration authorities began moves to deport him. He dared not leave the country for fear of being denied re-entry.
His relationship with Yoko seemed to founder (as so many had predicted it must) when he became serially and shamelessly unfaithful, finally decamping to Los Angeles with her young Chinese-American assistant, May Pang.
In a quintessential Yoko move, she had both demanded the separation and detailed Pang to be his minder and bedfellow, keeping him on ice as it were. And after the 18 months of drunken roistering with Elton John, Keith Moon of The Who and Harry Nilsson that John later termed his ‘Lost Weekend’, she consented to take him back.
In 1973, the couple moved into the Dakota Building on Central Park West, a Gothic apartment block which had been the location for Roman Polanski’s horror film Rosemary’s Baby.
The following year, after a long legal battle, John received the Green Card that allowed him permanent US residency and to travel outside its shores. He and Yoko agreed to give up drugs, which had included heroin, to try again to have a child (they had already lost one) and, in her poignant words, to ‘grow old together.’
When I embarked on my Beatles biography, Shout, in 1978, John hadn’t put out an album for three years and was seemingly shut away in the Dakota like a rock ‘n’roll Howard Hughes.
His Aunt Mimi gave me his full address; I wrote and asked him for an interview but received the same printed refusal as many others before me.
Then in August 1980, just as I was finishing the book, his voice suddenly came back on the radio with a new single entitled ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’, sounding far milder than the caustic ‘working class hero’ of the early 1970s.
Soon it became an album titled ‘Double Fantasy’, one side by John, the other by Yoko, proclaiming they were still together despite all the curses heaped on their partnership 10 years earlier.
From the resulting blizzard of media interviews it emerged that John had spent the past five years as a ‘househusband’, caring and cooking for Sean while Yoko looked after his business affairs, multiplying his royalty income by shrewd investments in property and a herd of valuable Holstein cattle.
But now he was back ‘in the game’, all his old demons seemingly exorcised, and looking forward to a new creative phase in his forties.
I was on the point of delivering Shout to its British publishers, but I left it open-ended in hopes of getting to talk to John as a postscript.
That hope vanished in the early hours of December 9, 1980, with a phone call from a friend in New York. John had been shot and fatally wounded by a demented fan when he and Yoko returned to the Dakota after a late-night recording session.
It was a horror Yoko’s worst enemy couldn’t have wished on her. And in the worldwide shock and disbelief, much of the old animosity towards her melted away. Instead, there was admiration for the dignity she showed and belated recognition that John and she had been made for each other.
Nonetheless, that old, shocking gene was still in her, stronger than ever. After John’s murder she released a solo album, ‘Season of Glass’, whose cover was a photograph she took of his bloodstained glasses.
In May 1982 I went to New York to publicise Shout’s US edition and appeared on ABC-TV’s Good Morning America show. As I walked off the set, the floor-manager said there was a phone call for me.
On the line was Yoko. ‘What you just said about John was very nice,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’d like to come over and see where we were living.’
So later that day I was inside the Dakota at last though, alas, five months too late. Like one of her bisected chairs or teacups in the 60s. I was to get only half of John and Yoko.