In honor of Yoko Ono's 90th birthday this week, here's her 1981 cover story, online for the first time. 'To me John was a mountain,' she told bagrau. 'And I was the wind. By connecting with him, I became anchored.'
After her father became president of the Bank of Tokyo in New York, the Ono family moved in 1951 to Scarsdale, New York. Yoko attended Sarah Lawrence College but dropped out to elope with Toshi Ichiyanagi, a talented, Juilliard-trained pianist. Through him, she made her first contacts with avant-garde musicians and artists, including John Cage and La Monte Young. She began to stage performances and sponsor artists’ “events” in her lower Manhattan loft.
“I asked her what she wanted to be and she said, ‘A psychologist,'” Yoko recalls. Though Kyoko promised to visit, she never appeared at the Dakota. Bur she did send a telegram of condolence after Lennon died. “When she comes out, I will tell her straight the kind of life I had and what happened,” Yoko adds. “Despite the fact that I wasn’t tying her shoelaces during the years we were together, we had a buddy-buddy relationship and I’m sure she missed me as a mother.
Most of Yoko’s days are spent in her dimly lighted work studio, a room dominated by Egyptian artifacts and a massive oil painting of John and Sean hanging above her piano. It was a surprise gift from father and son, who posed last year while on vacation in Bermuda. She composes in this room, adding pieces to her “pending” song folder kept in an attache case, bits and pieces she may use if she decides to perform, as she now considers doing.
Since the tragedy, Sean keeps saying that he wants to learn karate or kung fu, and he is more physically active. But I don’t stop him from saying things like “I’m gonna shoot you.” I just ignore it. It’s not like he’s obsessed about it.Eventually, I would like to think that the world will be so peaceful we won’t need to carry guns. But of course guns are not the only weapons. Control the guns, and somebody will think of another method. It’s not the weapon that creates murder — it’s the mind.
We never discussed what death was. It seemed like he knew. He already had this concept that John is out “there” and he’s still talking to him. And it’s an unknown territory for me, too. So I decided I’m not going to hold back. When I start crying, I say, “Oh, Sean, I don’t know what to do; what are we going to do?” I’m not trying to be a strong mother in front of him. By being myself, I’m trying to tell him, “Be yourself, open up.”was to put Sean on it.
I could live out the memory of my past fourteen years for the next fifty years and be like Mrs. Havisham in Charles Dickens’sitting in the dust in exactly the same position: “This is where John sat, this is where we sat together. This is his picture. This is the letter he sent me.”], which has been a mess since last October, and I found a little note from John saying, “I’m going to take a nap, so be sure, if you go out, to come back for lunch.
Afterward, the thing that made me feel most terrible was that John kept wanting a second child. We were planning another child. Before the five years of seclusion, we had never planned anything. But we did a lot of planning during that time, like the five houses, so we could spend the winter in Florida and the summers wherever. So I said: “Well, I have to stop smoking first. And you and I have to do a cleaning job — a juice fast. After we do that,we’ll have our next child.
Yoko phoned me one morning to chat about the angle a Los Angeles music critic had chosen in writing about her for his paper. “It’s another ‘grieving widow’ story,” she sighed. were bigger than Jesus. But that was real! And I’m glad he made that statement, even though I know that he paid the price for it.Yes, it was very comforting. He played with Sean, and it was a beautiful, sweet gesture, I thought.No. My way of taking it now is that, because of what had happened to me, they felt intimidated about inviting me, because it was really not the right time to encounter people being happy … but it would have been nice to have been told about it!It’s like we’re a family.
When you compare John to other men, he was a terribly independent guy. He was financially independent. I was doing the business — but that’s incidental. He could have hired lawyers and accountants. If there had been a situation in which he would have had to live apart from me, I’m sure he could have done it. But heOf course he had a need to be dependent, too. What was beautiful was that he wasn’t afraid to show it — that was the difference.
When John and I met, we did take acid, but he had stopped using it in the extreme because he was afraid of getting burned out. He was eager to have a child, and we were having so many miscarriages that we felt it was because of his drug intake in the past.Honesty, taken out of context, could endanger us. Ask me whether John was taking anything during our five years together, and I’d say no. But what you want to know is what we were doing in London.
When you asked me about John being a junkie during the five years when I was with him, it hurt me, because I know how he suffereda rigid diet that I used to feel, “Do weto live like this?” I mean, Sean was brought up on rice milk instead of cow milk, and there were times when we ate only vegetables. Part of me is feeling responsible to those people who are waiting for the archives to be straightened out. I know publishers really want John and Yoko’s story — how we met and all of that. But I’m not ready to write that.that dialogue between John and me, is 120 hours of tape. For me to sort it out now would beunhealthy for me. First of all, I’m not much of an archivist. My mentality is not that of a librarian. And I don’t like living among many gravestones. Or many, many father figures.
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