It was one of New York’s precious mild spring afternoons in 1982 when I walked across Central Park in answer to Yoko’s summons.
Cheerful red geraniums now spilled out of the great iron vases along the Dakota’s frontage. Five months on, there were still mourners outside its Gothic archway at the spot where Mark David Chapman had stepped out of the December night and pumped five shots into John Lennon’s back.
Yoko received me in a long ground-floor office, seated in a gold-inlaid chair, modelled on Pharoah Tutankhamun’s throne. The ceiling of deep blue dotted with white clouds made me think of Imagine, ‘Above us only sky…’
In contrast with the fashion-free woman I’d met in the 60s, she was now chicly booted and polo-necked, with her hair tied back and a cigarillo between her lips.
The years with John had sprinkled her speech with British pronunciations like ‘cuppa tea’, sometimes with a touch of his Liverpudlian accent. He’d been wont to call her ‘Mother’, not in the Oedipal sense but as old-school northern working men used to address their wives: ‘Put t’kettle on, Mother…’
She talked about John as if I’d known him well – which, of course, I felt I had – but with an intimacy I’d never expected.
“A few days before it happened, I remember looking at him and he looked so good … so beautiful. I said to him “Hey, you’re even better-looking than when you were a Beatle.”
“After it happened, I couldn’t eat anything, then all I wanted was chocolate. I kept remembering how John used to love it and how whenever I went out, I’d always bring him home a little chocolate something.…Elton [John] was so sweet. He sent me a big chocolate cake. My diet went crazy for about a month – nothing but chocolate and mushrooms.”
No questions were off-limits, I realised, just as none used to be with John. According to Yoko, the charge that she’d controlled and manipulated him had been the opposite of the truth. Pioneer feminist though she was, she’d observed the ancient Japanese convention of wifely deference, even when it came to his extreme possessiveness and jealousy:
“My God, he wrote “Jealous Guy” all about himself,’ she said. ‘When we first got together, he made me write out a list of all the other men I’d ever slept with […] He stopped me from reading books or newspapers in Japanese because if I did, he wouldn’t know what I was thinking. If I didn’t look at him all the time, straight in the eye, he’d start to get upset.”
I asked about the story that she’d never let him alone, even when he went into the gents’ at Abbey Road studios:
“That was more of the jealous guy. He made me go in there with him. He was afraid that if I stayed in the studio with Paul, George and Ringo, I’d run off with one of them.”
Afterwards, she gave me a tour of the vast white seventh-floor apartment where the rock star who’d once been unable to change a lightbulb had learned how to change a baby’s nappies, to cook and even bake bread.
On the wall in the kitchen was a painting of John, Yoko and their son, Sean, in Superman outfits, soaring upward, hand-in-hand. John’s guitar was still hanging at the head of the marital bed.
A triangular corner room contained every garment he’d ever worn back to his schooldays; the Quarry Bank blazers, Hamburg-era black leather, 60s Beatle suits, 70s floppy caps and capes all on revolving racks in the twilight like some ghostly boutique.
‘Make the most of this,’ I told myself, ‘because you’ll never be here again.’ How wrong I was.
I found myself back there in 1988, following publication of the American ‘academic’ Albert Goldman’s book The Lives of John Lennon, laughably portraying John as a psychopathic killer, wife-beater and child-molester whose songs had all been plagiarisms of ‘Pop Goes The Weasel.’
Yoko seemed small and vulnerable as she told me how Goldman’s onslaught had almost driven her to suicide, but she’d dismissed the idea because of her son, Sean, who was then aged 13.
She then introduced me to a boy with an uncanny look of his late father as well as his mother and I realised I was to be the first writer allowed to interview Sean.
In 1995 I was at the Dakota for a third time, just before the release of The Beatles Anthology, the TV documentary and CD set which finally reunited the four long after the world had given up wishing for it.
Despite continuing tensions with the remaining Beatles – ‘the in-laws’, as she drily called them – Yoko had contributed some solo tracks made by John at the Dakota, onto which Paul and George had each overdubbed a vocal.
One of her most implacable enemies during John’s lifetime had been his Aunt Mimi, who’d raised him single-handedly to be a nice middle-class boy and who xenophobically dubbed Yoko ‘the Poison Dwarf.’
Yet after John’s death, when his aunt needed 24-hour care, Yoko paid for it.
In 2002 she bought Mimi’s faux-Tudor ‘semi’ in Woolton, Liverpool, where John had spent his boyhood, and gave it to the National Trust to be opened to the public, together with a regular income for its upkeep. We met again there, surreally talking in facing Art Deco armchairs in Aunt Mimi’s sitting-room.
The next year, I had breakfast with Yoko at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and asked for her co-operation in a definitive biography of John. She agreed, on only one condition: she would vet my manuscript for factual accuracy alone and, if she approved of it, would contribute a foreword. (Every publisher to whom I mentioned this last clause fervently hoped she wouldn’t do that.)
How nice and normal she is, I thought, until I offered her the honey for her croissant. ‘I don’t eat honey,’ she told me. ‘It isn’t fair to the bees.’
Between 2004 and 2007, I interviewed her many times: at the Dakota, over lunch in London, in Paris after her opening of an exhibition devoted to John and in Las Vegas after the premiere of Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles musical, Love.
She was always totally honest, often laughing - even at herself. She showed me family albums recording happy, pre-Second World War times with her wealthy Americanised parents, who often took her across the Pacific from Tokyo to San Francisco by ship. There was a snapshot of Yoko on one voyage as a toddler, winning a children’s fancy-dress contest as the infant film star Shirley Temple, complete with giant lollipop.
She confessed that her seeming iron invulnerability had been a facade: she’d had almost as many insecurities as John and he’d often been the one who reassured her.
“I thought I was too short, my legs were the wrong shape, I used to cover my face with my hair… and I was always hiding my hands…John said to me ‘No, you’re beautiful. You don’t have to hide your hands, your legs are perfect, tie your hair back and let people see your face.’”
She often told me how well she thought I understood John and how comfortable she felt during our talks. When one of our Dakota meetings fell on my birthday, she gave me an iPod (remember those?) with the engraved inscription ‘Love Yoko.’
She also sent me her collected vocal and musical pieces: a box-set of six CDs, when John’s entire solo oeuvre been on only four. I later learned that the US military was playing them at top volume to wear down the resistance of terrorism suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay.
During one of our conversations, she suddenly told me, ‘I don’t do much in bed’, and I wondered what was coming next. But she continued, ‘John used to say I reminded him of those Victorian ladies who just lay there and thought of England.’
However, one of her stories about John chilled me to the bone. John had just received his Green Card and so could travel to Japan with her to meet her family for the first time. During the visit, he read a magazine which happened to contain a photograph of Yoko’s maternal great-grandfather, Zenjiro Yasuda, a hugely wealthy and prominent figure who became the Emperor’s personal banker.
Zenjiro wore the same little round spectacles as John, was known as a talented musician and singer and even had the same birthday.’That’s me in another life,’ he told Yoko. ‘Please don’t say that,’ she begged. ‘He was assassinated.’
Like John’s a century later, Zenjiro’s killer had been young and a former admirer whose reverence had curdled into hatred, but the murder-weapon a blade, not a .38 handgun.
My last visit to the Dakota promised to be the most pleasant yet. Yoko hadn’t read my manuscript, but said she’d heard ‘good things’ about it from people who had, and invited me to ‘drop by for a cuppa tea’
She also promised I’d be allowed to quote from John’s diary, stolen after his death by an employee but now back in her possession – even saying she’d decided which page I could use.
Turning up at the Dakota apartment prepared for praise, I found Yoko waiting for me with two lawyers, the senior one a famed legal Rottweiler named Peter Shukat. It wasn’t a tea party but an ambush.
She had now read my manuscript and decided, or been advised by one of her several competing aides, that I’d been ‘mean to John’ even though all its best anecdotes had come directly from her.
Icily furious, she was unrecognisable as the warm, very human person I’d come to know over the past three years. Also present was an unidentified woman whose role was unclear until Yoko shouted ‘How can you say that John masturbated?’ (which she herself had told me). At this, the mystery woman went ‘Ugh!’ and gave a theatrical shudder and I realised she was Yoko’s personal shudderer.
I tried conciliation, asking her to tell me which parts of the book were troubling her and I’d try to put them right. But no dice: she said she was withdrawing her co-operation and demanded that I hand over the tapes of our 12-plus hours of interviews and also those with Sean and her daughter, Kyoko.
The naked intimidation, sometimes by the lawyer Peter Shukat but mostly by Yoko, went on for something like two hours at the long table where John used to sit smoking roll-ups, usually with a cat on his lap.
When I finally got up to go, having not given in over the tapes, the supposed Rottweiler Shukat saw me to the door - and apologised for Yoko’s behaviour.
The one-page agreement between us gave her no right to withdraw her co-operation once given and the physical tapes, if not the contents, belonged to me.
Even so, during the year-long run up to the book’s publication, I lived in daily dread that she’d launch legal proceedings to block it. But none came, nor did she ever contact me again.
Had she decided my biography wasn’t so mean after all? I’ll probably never know.