Yoko Ono kneels onstage before a packed Carnegie Recital Hall, dressed in black, a large pair of shears beside her. It’s 1965, a year before she would meet John Lennon. One by one, audience members approach to snip hem, collar and sleeve from her body. While most are modest in their takings, one man stands over her, cutting away her slip before slicing through the straps of her bra beneath. Ono sits expressionless, nearly serene, while the audience takes what it wants from her.
“Cut Piece,” an experiment in weaponizing the male gaze and a masterpiece of conceptual art, opens David Sheff’s new biography of Ono, published this week by Simon & Schuster.
The Tokyo-born artist, best known outside the avant-garde for her marriage to Lennon, was long reviled as the succubus who broke up the Beatles. In “Yoko,” her first significant biography, Mr. Sheff, a prolific journalist, draws her out of the mist of obfuscation and rumor, defending her freewheeling career with gusto.
Few writers are better equipped to tell her story. Mr. Sheff was just 24 in 1980 when he landed a Playboy interview with Lennon and Ono on the eve of their comeback record, “Double Fantasy.” In the span of a few weeks, he became a regular at the Dakota, where their conversations would be Lennon’s final major interview, and the beginning of a lifelong friendship with Ono.
The Light sat down with Mr. Sheff in his Inverness home to discuss Ono’s upbringing and output, her long misunderstood reputation and that fateful Playboy interview. He will speak about his book this Saturday at Commonweal, in Bolinas.
Point Reyes Light: The story about how you ended up interviewing John and Yoko for Playboy as a rookie reporter is amazing. Could you tell me more?
David Sheff: A teacher of mine from Berkeley was involved in starting New West magazine, and she asked if I was interested in interning there. It was a wild time to be a journalist in San Francisco—I worked on stories like the Zodiac Killer, Jim Jones and the People’s Temple and the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone.
I was trying to break into bigger publications. After hundreds of letters and countless rejections, I got an assignment from a Playboy editor to interview John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Just as I was leaving his office, he asked if I had a way to get to John Lennon and I said sure. I sent letters and telegrams and made phone calls—until one telegram eventually got to Yoko. I got a call asking for my date and place of birth. Apparently, Yoko was making her decisions based on astrology, numerology and Tarot, and I passed. I guess the stars aligned.
PRL: Were you a big Lennon fan?
DS: Oh god yes—I was obsessed. I grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, which was very conservative. I was a pretty isolated and lonely kid. Hearing the Beatles—and the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and David Bowie—completely changed my life. But especially John Lennon’s songs. When I heard “Strawberry Fields Forever,” I felt like someone was speaking directly to me, telling me it was going to be okay and that there was a bigger world out there.
PRL: How about Yoko? Were you thinking about her role as this vilified femme fatal that supposedly broke up the Beatles? There was so much misogynistic and anti-Asian commentary aimed at her.
DS: Part of the lore around Yoko was that she was this dragon lady that hypnotized John, manipulated him, stalked him and ended up breaking up the band. She was hated. I remember headlines like “Is Yoko the most hated woman in the world?” I was aware of that, and I also saw how devoted John was to correcting that image. During the interview, I realized how much it weighed on them all those years. They felt like it contributed to a lot of their struggles, their unhappiness, their heroin use.
PRL: That piece ran in December 1980, right after John was killed. That’s surreal timing.
DS: It came out the first week of December. My editor sent an advanced copy to the Dakota, and Yoko and John called me from their kitchen to say how pleased they were with it, and how excited they were about the reception of “Double Fantasy.” The next day, John was murdered. The magazine hit newsstands that same day. It was his last in-depth interview, so for many, those were John’s last words.
PRL: When did you start thinking you might want to write a biography of Yoko?
DS: Right after John died, Yoko and I became friends. We spent a lot of time together, on the phone and traveling, and when I visited New York, I’d stay at the Dakota. When she came out here, she’d visit Inverness. About five years ago, I was just perplexed by the fact that so many people still had that same image of Yoko, the same prejudices, and were still repeating the same old story. I realized there had never been a definitive biography, so I proposed it to my editor, and he signed on pretty quickly.
PRL: I think as a journalist, there’s often a distance, a boundary between the writer and their subject. But you crossed that threshold and became her friend.
DS: From 1975 to 1980, John and Yoko lived a very quiet life with a small circle of friends. John called himself a house husband, devoted to raising Sean, while Yoko managed their business. I came in at a time when they were probably the happiest they’d ever been—absolutely in love. We spent three intense weeks together during the interview and while they worked on their record.
After John died, I think it mattered to Yoko that I witnessed them during that moment. I was also one of the people that circled the wagons around her during that very difficult period after his death. She was robbed, blackmailed and her life was threatened; she spent a million dollars on security that first year.
PRL: Were those threats from Chapman copycats, or was Mark Chapman just part of a larger group of people who resented them?
DS: A lot of it was copycats. The first one that was caught said he had come to finish the job Chapman started. Celebrity—and there were few people as famous as John—brings out intense devotion, and violent and evil inclinations in a few individuals.
PRL: Has Yoko read the book?
DS: She hasn’t, and I’m not sure if she will. But Sean and Kyoko did, and I think they were very moved. Both of her children had very difficult lives. Sean’s father was murdered, and his mother suffered deeply for much of his childhood. Kyoko was essentially kidnapped by her father and spent years disconnected from Yoko. I didn’t want to cause them more pain than they’d already experienced, but I also wanted to tell the truth. That speaks to something you brought up earlier: how hard it is to write about a friend. I didn’t want to write a white-washed puff piece, because I am a journalist. But at the same time, I’m clearly biased.
PRL: It’s a hard line to walk, and you openly address that right away.
DS: A disclosure felt important. It also helped that John and Yoko were among the most open people you could imagine. John wrote, “Give me some truth,” and Yoko wrote, “I want the truth and nothing more.” They talked about their relationship, John’s infidelity, their drug use—all the dark stuff. So, in telling their story, I let that openness guide me.
PRL: You sometimes read autobiographies where the author over-pathologizes their subject, and you managed to avoid that while still delving into her complex attachments to her family and husbands, her attempted suicides.
DS: I did explore the influence of her childhood—surviving war, experiencing starvation when she was a little girl—and then of course later, how John’s death influenced her art and music. But I get annoyed when people do that beyond a certain point.
I found it curious how Yoko, later in life, made this artwork devoted to her mother and all mothers called “My Mommy is Beautiful.” She had a very, very difficult relationship with her mother yet made this incredibly moving art piece dedicated to her. Maybe it was easier to love a conceptual mother than the real one who hurt her.
PRL: The image of Yoko as 12-year-old in Tokyo during World War II, lying in bed with a fever and watching the city burn outside her window, is incredibly haunting.
DS: That’s where I began my research—I started with her childhood, her family history, her ancestors. I traveled to Japan to understand the context of those formative years.
PRL: It must have felt like you could’ve kept digging forever.
DS: It did. The book ended up being 110,000 words but I think I originally had about 600,000. A lot of the cutting was painful—there was so much more detail about every phase of her life. A book could be written about each year in Yoko and John’s life together.