by Bob Spitz
But except for those ten months in exile, where she lived among starving peasants, Yoko never suffered from privation. Throughout her childhood, she was raised in a bubble of sumptuous privilege, groomed by a team of servants for enlightenment and social status. Nothing was ever denied her; and after the war, there was no limit to the special treatment she received—ballet lessons, piano instruction, private tutoring, etiquette. Most overindulged Japanese girls raised in such a royal manner became, in the tightly regulated atmosphere of rebuilding, duty-bound to leisure, but Yoko Ono was not destined for anything so conventional. She had always been a curious young woman; now, as her curiosity became subject to maturity, it took on a more ambitious nature. Yoko returned to Gakushuin, concentrating in writing, poetry, and music, and in 1951 enrolled in Gakushuin University, where she intended to matriculate as the first female philosophy major. Ironically, her own mother planted the seeds of rebellion. “She used to tell me that even a woman could become a diplomat or prime minister if she was as bright as I,” Yoko reflected in an interview with a Japanese journalist. “She also said that I should not be so foolish as to get married or that I should not be foolish enough to have children.”
Rebellious to a fault, Yoko did both.
In 1952 Yoko’s father was repatriated from Indonesia and rewarded with another American posting, this one more important and permanent than the previous sojourns. The Bank of Japan handed him its New York branch office, which was leading the way in underwriting the rebuilding of Tokyo. Soon after Eisuke’s transfer, Yoko joined the family in America, resuming her studies in 1953 at Sarah Lawrence College, whose campus wasn’t far from her home in suburban Scarsdale. There were no majors or grades given at the college, freeing its small body of creative students to express themselves independently. Yoko impressed teachers and classmates as being a “particularly adept” writer of short stories and shone with brilliance, it was said, in music theory. But neither felt right. “See, I was writing poetry and [doing] music and painting, and none of that satisfied me,” she told Rolling Stone in a 1975 interview. “I knew that the medium was wrong. Whenever I wrote a poem, they said it was too long, it was like a short story; and a short story was like a poem. I felt that I was a misfit in every medium.” She was looking for “an additional act,” she said, something that allowed her to adequately express her art in a way that existed outside the box.
The answer lay only twenty-five miles away, in New York City. The postwar blinders had come off Manhattan’s creative community, and the best minds of every discipline were mixing media as though they were martinis. Great concoctions burbled up from the imaginative wilds, and from this crucible lively scenes developed. The most attractive to Yoko Ono was the avant-garde. The avant-garde was like rocket fuel: you could go anywhere with it, even into outer space.
No shrinking violent, she took right off, staging her own events, or pieces, as she preferred to call them, in what would become a characteristically kooky way. Her debut piece, “Painting to Be Stepped On,” instructed participants to lay a sheet of blank canvas on the ground and to walk on it; another—“Pea Piece”—involved dropping frozen peas at random places throughout the course of a day, like Hansel and Gretel. Her pieces became more outrageous—and annoyingly adolescent—as figures on the avant-garde scene began to take notice.
And notice they did, in cosmetic ways as well. During her freshman year at Sarah Lawrence, Yoko’s clothes looked almost deliberately chosen to make her appear more Western, as if they’d been borrowed from an Asian version of Blackboard Jungle. By the time she hit Greenwich Village, however, Yoko had refined her look, giving herself a more severe, almost spooky twist: a baggy black sweater thrown over a black leotard, with her long black hair brushed out and frizzed below the waist. Tall women carried off the pose with sinuous grace. But Yoko, who was tiny and not particularly trim, looked like a character lifted out of one of Charles Addams’s cartoons. Although her features were Oriental and her complexion a burnished gold, she was not an exotic woman, and this only added to the overall ethereal effect. Not that Yoko seemed to care one way or the other. If her appearance happened to put people off, she would fix them with either a blank stare or an enigmatic, Mona Lisa smile.
One admirer who caught the right impression of that smile was Toshi Ichiyanagi, a standout piano student at Juilliard—a true prodigy, in fact, whose entry into the avant-garde scene was primed by his progressive master, Vincent Persichetti, the man credited with grooming Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Toshi shared Yoko’s passion for John Cage’s experimental work, and together they launched themselves into the enthusiastic circle of artists and performers that revolved around the form. In the spring of 1956 she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence and moved into a cold-water flat in SoHo with Toshi, thus rerouting the direction of her life.
New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a breeding ground of young militants pursuing revolutionary visions of how modern music and art should be produced. John Cage and Arnold Schönberg had ushered in a fertile avant-garde scene that now included Judith Malina and Julian Beck, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Diane Wakoski, Paul Morrissey, and dozens of other artists (many later breaking away to launch the pop art movement), all of whom seemed to reflect one another’s intensity.
In the thick of this creative ferment, Yoko encountered two men who would have a far greater effect on her life than her first two husbands combined: La Monte Young, the enfant terrible extraordinaire of conceptual art, a man of such enormous visionary talent that serious musicians still discuss his legendary performances the way chess masters dissect classic openings; and George Maciunas, an “eccentric’s eccentric,” whose uptown art gallery not only launched Yoko Ono but also Fluxus, the experimental movement of renegade artists devoted to demolishing artistic conventions by “promoting living art, anti-art” and what its manifesto referred to as a “non-art reality.” Together and separately, they staged a series of events (known as “happenings”) in New York lofts and walk-ups that stretched over many years and stood the underground art scene on its head. La Monte Young composed several-hour-long pieces whose entire score consisted of two notes for the cello, two droning notes that were supposed to create their own energy, while collaborators made chalk drawings on the floor around him. As Albert Goldman noted: “Long before Jimi Hendrix set light to his guitar, LaMonte Young ignited a violin on stage.” Another piece called for the release of a handful of butterflies. Maciunas, on the other hand, was a card-carrying provocateur (although some preferred the term con artist). Nothing delighted him more than coaxing a wicked laugh from the viewer of some outrageous project or stunt perpetrated in the name of Fluxus: sacks filled with paper while a band played military marches, poems filled entirely with nonsense syllables, collages assembled from the detritus of local odd-lot shops.
For Yoko Ono, both mentors fulfilled the visions and images that had been caroming around her head. She took both men for lovers, separating from Toshi, who proved to be, in Yoko’s words, “very kind” in regard to a string of affairs she engaged in throughout their marriage. It is difficult to know the extent of their understanding. Friends have referred to it as “an open marriage” or “partnership,” but in any regard the arrangement had clearly run its course. In early 1961, after Toshi returned to Tokyo, Yoko devoted every waking moment to launching her career, pushing full steam ahead under the guidance of her mentors.
On November 24, 1961, Yoko staged her first uptown performance at the Carnegie Recital Hall, an intimate theater above the renowned concert house, which featured works in progress by artists who were either on their way up or on their way down. Yoko’s “opera,” as she billed it, was so strange and unexpected that it had the odd effect of confirming neither direction. One movement in particular caught the slender audience unawares. Entitled “A Grapefruit in the World of Park,” it was performed in darkness as well as near silence so that listeners, as she explained afterward, “would start to feel the environment and ten
sion and people’s vibrations.” At one point, two men tied together, with empty cans and bottles strewn around them, wriggled their way from one end of the stage to the other. “I wanted the sound of people perspiring in it, too, so I had all the dancers wear contact microphones, and the instructions were to bring out very heavy boxes and take them back across the stage, and while they were doing that, they were perspiring a little. There was one guy who was asthmatic, and it was fantastic.” Mostly outraged concertgoers exiting the hall were overheard venting their indignation at the crazy experience.
There were other similar performances in New York, one more infuriating than the next, but audiences showed little interest in Yoko’s work, the critics even less. Hardly any serious writers wasted ink on a review. Frustrated by their reaction (or rather, lack thereof), she returned to Tokyo in 1963, where much of the avant-garde community had rallied around her husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi.
But there was no sign of encouragement and no one in Tokyo to inspire her. For months on end she languished in solitude, in a sterile eleventh-floor high-rise, contemplating suicide. Her intention was to escape, to loose the chains of boredom at any cost. On more than one occasion, Yoko’s reckless gesture toward an open window forced Toshi to restrain her from plunging to her death. For reasons that are unclear, Yoko had unchecked access to a prescription for sleeping pills and the requisite overdose nearly delivered the coup de grâce. Yoko woke up in a sanitorium, where she was confined for several weeks. It was during this time that Yoko met Tony Cox, a small-time hustler with an art background, who rescued her from her depression and set out to make her a star.
In the course of their tempestuous romance, there was one remaining hitch: she still had not resolved the situation with Toshi. Further complications arose when Yoko discovered she was pregnant. This was not the first time; in the past, Yoko’s form of birth control was abortion, of which there were many. “In New York I was always having abortions,” she told Esquire in a 1970 article, “because I was too neurotic to take precautions.” But Cox persuaded her to have the baby and to marry him. “Tony and the doctors frightened me into thinking that I could not safely have another abortion,” she recalled. Some suspected that Yoko’s pregnancy provided a safety net for Tony Cox, a solution to plaguing visa problems, which marriage and a child would resolve. “Tony got her pregnant to stay in Japan,” a close friend insisted.
On August 3, 1963, Yoko gave birth to a girl they named Kyoko Chan. If having Kyoko was intended to bring stability to Yoko and Tony’s relationship, it couldn’t have been a more wrongheaded decision. The newlyweds were living in a minuscule one-room flat in Shibuya, a neighborhood of mostly artists, musicians, and writers, where a baby only intensified the couple’s sense of isolation. How could one create and perform with a newborn infant demanding so much attention? It hadn’t been much of a marriage to begin with, and before long, Yoko, an indifferent mother, could not cope. Instead, she buried herself in writing and performing new pieces, including the self-publication of Grapefruit, the book of whimsical poems she later gave John as a calling card.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1964, Yoko staged a series of events in Tokyo and Kyoto that traded on her cockamamie instructional scenarios. One, appropriately titled “Sweep Piece,” was a four-hour performance during which the audience watched a janitor sweep out the entire theater, stroke by stroke. Another, “Touch Piece,” lasting from dusk to dawn, instructed participants to do nothing more than touch their neighbors. Yoko’s most provocative piece during this period, performed at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, was “Cut Piece,” in which she appeared on stage in a fetching black dress and invited members of the audience, one by one, to approach and snip away at her clothing with a pair of large scissors. There was always some reluctance from people to participate in a potentially humiliating and grotesque to-do, but eventually one spectator would timidly volunteer—even if it was Tony, appearing as a shill—setting off a group reflex ultimately resulting in near nudity.
Proper recognition as a concept artist was still a long way off, but the Japanese audiences’ volatile reaction convinced Yoko that she could not stay in Japan if she expected to attract serious attention. If there were to be additional acts to the Yoko Ono Show, she had to be ready to take it on the road. Yoko landed in New York alone in November 1964, without Tony and Kyoko, the first move in what was effectively a trial separation. Over the next six months Yoko launched an all-out assault, diving right into this mutant gene pool. She staged event after event through 1965, many under the guidance of Tony Cox, who had returned to her side and resumed his promotional crusade.
It was during this go-go period that Yoko performed the pivotal piece that would jump-start her career. In the corner of a gallery located in the Judson Memorial Church in lower Manhattan, where she lived with Kyoko, Yoko performed “Stone Piece,” in which she crawled into a large cloth bag, either alone or with Cox, took off her clothes, and engaged in some form of sex. Other times, she would sit, solitary, for hours, moving occasionally, and then only slightly, to provoke the interest of passersby who gathered to watch. “Inside there might be a lot going on,” she explained coyly. “Or maybe nothing’s going on.” Everything depended on the imagination. A critic from Cue called it “hypnotically dreamlike,” which was only one of many ways the piece affected viewers.
While it didn’t bring fame, as Yoko had hoped, something almost as attractive materialized from the Judson Church show: an invitation to participate in a symposium in London called “Destruction in Art,” organized by movers and shakers in the avant-garde scene there. Thanks to Tony’s resilient advance work, she arrived trailing a paper storm of frothy reviews, many of them written to order by her dutifully calculating husband. Her performance at “Destruction in Art,” on September 28, 1966, already a hotbed of expectation, caused a minor sensation. Appearing before a packed crowd of enthusiasts, Yoko performed both her “Cut” and “bag” pieces, finishing with a number in which she instructed the audience to shout out the first words that came to mind for a period of five minutes.
The London papers were nearly as enthusiastic as the boosters at the symposium, which saluted her pieces with prolonged worshipful applause. The art critic for the Financial Times called Yoko’s performance “uplifting,” and a reviewer for the Daily Telegraph called her performance an “elevated conclusion” to an otherwise “dreadful” symposium. Barry Miles, partner with Peter Asher and John Dunbar in the recently opened Indica Bookshop, had seen the performance that night and invited Yoko to showcase an exhibit entirely of her choosing in the basement gallery. The offer, as Miles presented it, was too good to pass up, and it paid off in spades when John Lennon walked in the door.
[III]
Yoko was drawn both to John and to the girth of his bankbook, which could endow her career. Many newcomers to her London entourage recall Yoko and Tony actively seeking a well-situated backer for their projects. “A Beatle,” several remember, and according to a close friend: “She said, half-laughingly, ‘I’d like to marry John Lennon.’ ”
John was genuinely intrigued by the odd combination of exoticism and absurdity that Yoko projected, but admitted being “intimidated” by her as well. The way she carried herself, as though nothing could derail her from her mission, was for John the most powerful turn-on. One of his strongest impressions from the start was not of Yoko’s work, which he considered “far out,” but of her loose, liberated manner, which made him realize she was “somebody that you could go and get pissed with, and to have exactly the same relationship as any mate in Liverpool.” It “bowled me over,” he acknowledged. He’d never known a woman so much like himself.
Apple was still in its critical infancy and required whatever part of John’s attention he could muster. In January 1968 the Beatles opened offices at 95 Wigmore Street, an eight-story high-rise around the corner from EMI, and began staffing it with friends and cronies. The old Liverpool gang (Derek Taylor referred to them as “the
old courtiers”)—Peter Brown, Geoffrey Ellis, Alistair Taylor, Terry Doran, and Tony Bramwell—were brought over from NEMS; Derek Taylor agreed to return as Apple’s press officer; and Peter Asher, Jane’s talented brother, launched an A&R department dedicated to recording new talent. John was also collaborating on a short play based on material from his two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, that no less an august temple than Britain’s National Theatre planned to stage in June. And to top it off, before the Beatles left for India, they intended to squeeze in a session to record a new single.
The session, which began on February 3 and meandered over the next eight days, actually produced four sides, the most memorable being “Lady Madonna,” which was earmarked from the start as the group’s next—and final Parlophone—single. Paul had written it almost entirely himself, as “a tribute to women,” he said, although his images of women collide and contradict one another faster than the chitter-chatter of a Greek chorus. Nevertheless, the song returned the Beatles to a more straightforward rock ’n roll structure than they had practiced in the past few years, “not outright rock,” according to Paul (Ringo referred to it as “rockswing”), “but it’s that kind of thing.” The opening barrelhouse piano riff was lifted, Paul has since admitted, from Humphrey Lyttelton’s “Bad Penny Blues,” a minor hit released in 1956 and produced by none other than George Martin. The vocal, however, took its origins from a different source. “[The song] reminded me of Fats Domino,” Paul explained, “so I started singing a Fats Domino impression. It took my voice to a very odd place.” Odd, yet familiar to early rock ’n roll fans. Gone were the obliqueness and wearisome effects of the previous two albums. Gone, too, were the umpteen overdubs that made the Beatles’ songs impossible to duplicate in concert. “Lady Madonna,” for all its power, was basically recorded in a day—the old-fashioned way—with a chorus of saxophones added as an afterthought later in the week.
