Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  Unlike her third husband, Yoko excelled at academics. In 1952, she became the first female student accepted into the Philosophy program. The postwar intellectual mode at Gakushuin focused on the economic radicalism of Karl Marx, and existentialists like Kierkegaard and Sartre, as seen through the Zen Buddhist ideal of pure being. In this collegiate postwar setting, “People were acutely conscious of the need to reinvent their own lives,” notes historian John W. Dower.32 Although she dropped out after two semesters, this Gakushuin curriculum influenced Ono’s austere style in whatever medium she adopted, to project a sense of “wonderment,” or the pure Zen state of “emptiness.”

  When her father became director of the Bank of Tokyo’s U.S. operations, the Ono family moved again, this time to the affluent suburb of Scarsdale, New York, in 1952. Yoko enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, the renowned liberal-arts college in Bronxville, New York, that often attracted artistic daughters of well-to-do-families. She dropped out again, in 1955, this time to elope with Ichiyanagi Toshi, a Juilliard pianist and composer, to Manhattan. Drawn to highly creative, innovative men at a young age, Ono married Toshi in 1956, and together they pursued the most contemporary ideas in music and art. It was in New York that Yoko connected with the downtown scene, where musicians like jazz pioneer La Monte Young and composer John Cage were questioning the foundations of modernism and the nature of music itself.

  The New York avant-garde that attracted a young Yoko Ono was in the throes of a modernist exuberance that reached its high point in the fifties; among its leaders was a musician and pedagogue, Shinichi Suzuki, who gave lectures on Zen philosophy at Columbia University, and became an intellectual lightning rod. Pieces like John Cage’s 4'33" (of silence) were directly inspired by Suzuki’s instruction in the Dao and Zen principles. Like the Beat writers Ginsberg and Kerouac, these contemporary composers were inspired by Suzuki’s emphasis on everyday existence as ultimate enlightenment, and the Zen ideal of unself-conscious experience trumping the mind’s propensity to overcomplicate the simplest sensations. In his generationally influential book Silence, John Cage aimed to reorient the classical audience to the here and now, particularly the mundane “noise” of a typical concert hall: the sounds of bodies shifting in their chairs, ventilators humming, the creak of furniture, and the awkwardness of enforced “silence.” This quietude, of course, was never really pure silence at all, but simply a heightened awareness of any hall’s random underlying sounds. Yoko Ono took this idea further, declaring: “The only sound that exists . . . is the sound of the mind.”33

  Cage adopted these Eastern concepts into his own work. “Theirs was a cry to give art back to a social, rather than merely aesthetic, realm of meaning,” says art historian Alexandra Munroe of the new avant-garde. “Just as earlier manifestations of Dada and anti-art arose in Zurich [in the 1920s] in response to the cultural and moral blight wrought by World War I, when all that modernist progress had promised went severely wrong, so too the postwar avant-garde, emerging from the horrors of World War II renounced the abstractions of high art for the poetry of quotidian existence.”34 This concept of art roughly mirrored the dual pretensions of rock ’n’ roll, which employed crude sounds to express big ideas, and many of these New York figures admired the emerging pop art work of Europeans like Peter Blake, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Richard Hamilton. Soon, a young advertising designer from Pittsburgh with a reverse charisma, Andy Warhol, would emerge from this ferment to become the art world’s negative Elvis.

  Yoko Ono’s background in both Zen Buddhism and grade-school Christianity, as well as her international upbringing, provided her with a hybridized sensibility and gave her direct access to the ideas fueling these new crosscurrents. Above all, she noted, “the essence of Zen that connected with Cage and all of us was a sense of laughter. Laughter is God’s language.”35 Perhaps she saw the innate Orientalism in Warhol’s face, and in his work.

  So many fans assume that Ono had little previous work of her own and merely grafted herself onto Lennon’s empty celebrity. The truth suggests something quite different. In fact, in 1960, after being befriended by Cage and his circle, Ono rented a cold-water loft at 112 Chambers Street and staged a series of concerts that became legendary in the avant-garde world. This “Chambers Street series” featured a cross-section of artists, from poets and dancers to composers and musicians. As later cataloged by the downtown Reuben and Judson galleries, Ono provided a new frame of reference for these experiments across mediums, and the series became a touchstone for the rest of 1960s art. All of which seemed, in fact, like a preamble to what she would later do with Lennon.

  Art luminaries like Peggy Guggenheim and Marcel Duchamp attended some events, which became the talk of the underground. George Maciunas invited Ono into his Fluxus collective, a new society of modern artists who rejected abstract expressionism and embraced “conceptual art,” a term coined by Henry Flynt. The Fluxus spin on modernism focused on “happenings”—events where audience participation with the art and artist was inseparable from the art itself. As in the exploding rock music scene, the very point of seeing a Fluxus piece was in creating, or completing, the art with the artist. The democratic ideal literally invited the audience to step onstage, which brought new dynamics to how the art functioned. Participants got a very different charge from the one mere observers got. Instead of being formalized in a fancy frame, Fluxus ideas thrived in nontraditional settings—anywhere but a musty museum.

  Comfortable in many disparate worlds, Ono returned to Tokyo in the spring of 1962 for her exhibition at the Sogetsu Art Center, where she won critical accolades as a leading Japanese artist. But like most foreign occupations, the Americanization of Japan led to a resentful aftertaste, as “gratitude” for the occupation faded. With the Cold War metastasizing in Southeast Asia, a growing anti-Americanism prevailed, among both religious conservatives and cultural progressives. John Lennon and the Beatles felt the brunt of this traditionalism when protestors demonstrated against their appearance at the Nippon Budokan Temple in 1966, originally built for Tokyo’s judo Olympics competition of 1964. Because judo and martial arts have a spiritual dimension in Japanese culture, many thought the site too “sacred” for popular concerts. A similar political purism, of course, had led to the assassination of Yoko Ono’s great-grandfather back in 1921.

  Despite her role in the New York art scene of the early sixties, Ono remained wary of American influences. In October 1962, her husband, Ichiyanagi, invited John Cage and David Tudor to Tokyo to perform at the Sogetsu Art Center. But even at this early stage, Ono felt as though there was too much hero worship of these American figures. In addition, she felt patronized, as if being her husband’s wife overshadowed her own art. Add to this Cage’s nickname, “Jesus Christ,” which Ono perceived as evidence of a degenerative bourgeois streak in avant-garde culture. Her dual persona, as successful artist versus wifely appendage of a pianist, further strained the marriage and led her into a debilitating depression. A failed suicide attempt prompted her family to institutionalize her for several months. While she was in the hospital, a young American jazz musician and filmmaker, Anthony Cox, tracked her down out of admiration for her work. They were soon involved, his admiration hastening her recovery and release from the mental ward. In June 1963, they married and Yoko gave birth to her first child, Kyoko Chan Cox, that August.

  Fully recovered, Yoko Ono returned to Manhattan with her new husband in the fall of 1964, and the Fluxus group embraced her as a person with her own agenda. She appeared at Carnegie Hall, and her work was shown at the Judson Gallery and at the East End Theater in 1965. The following year, Ono and Cox traveled to London with Kyoko to attend the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS), which gathered artists from around the world to investigate many of the same radical ideas the Fluxus group espoused. Her influence in avant-garde circles was already pronounced. By this point, Ono had developed her Cut Piece—part art, part theater—which combined violence with anti-art and won her a provocative reputa
tion for acting out feminist themes before there was such a term.

  The Indica bookstore looked to Ono to kick off its gallery opening (simply an extension of the bookstore) with some major artistic noise. Outrage and controversy would sell tickets, and this far-out Japanese artist, who came with John Cage plaudits, sold tickets. The show that John Lennon saw in November 1966 constituted the largest collection of Yoko Ono’s work to date. Aside from the hammer-and-nail and climb-the-ladder pieces prominent in most descriptions of this show, it also included Ono’s shrewdly comic White Chess Set, where all of the pieces were white. Players would begin moving pieces to play an oversize match but quickly get mixed up as to whose pieces were whose, to the point where any game of capturing the queen and entrapping the king became increasingly pointless.

  Intellectually, Cynthia proved no match for someone of this background. As she remembers in both memoirs, she returned home within a couple of days after the initial “confrontation” to find her husband acting as though nothing had happened, a front he insisted on throughout that week. The couple had a long talk, during which John explained Yoko’s presence as just another fling. They even made love afterward, and Cynthia began to feel better, although she sensed John was “dabbling” in drugs again. It was her last chance: if she had kicked him out, or laid down a new gauntlet about his behavior, Cynthia might have found some self-respect—and earned some respect from Lennon. But the grooves of cheating and denial were too deeply engrained in him by this point.

  In fact, the old pattern reasserted itself so quickly it became a fait accompli: Cynthia would always be Lennon’s doormat, and he couldn’t stand himself for having such a wife. Yoko’s zealous pursuit seemed almost Greek in its intensity and focus. The contrast between these two women prompted less a decision than a tumble into a new world: Yoko had a professional identity all her own, yet seemed willing to engage in a creative partnership; Cynthia had always been, and would always be, identified through Lennon. And Lennon must have hated himself as much for how he treated his wife as for her unyielding compliance.

  That he fell back into drugs at this point jibes with the overarching pattern. Cynthia’s mother had discovered a stash of LSD while they were away in India and flushed it down the toilet. This infuriated Lennon, but “he couldn’t confront her without admitting that he used it, so he had to keep quiet.” Cynthia’s timeline seems confused, however, as she remembers John’s affection running up to his trip to New York. She actually wanted to go with him, but he waved her off, calling it a business trip with little time for relaxing. She sensed him freezing her out again.

  In the tradition of running off for a holiday instead of working everything through, Cynthia installed her mother in Ringo Starr’s flat in Montagu Street and went off, this time to Italy. She came back one night to find Magic Alex “hovering outside the hotel,” and it began to dawn on her that Alex had always been doing errands for Lennon, even by chaperoning her in Greece. “We went inside and found Mum sitting in the lobby, looking distressed,” Cynthia writes. “I asked Alex what was going on. He said, ‘I’ve come with a message from John. He is going to divorce you, take Julian away from you and send you back to Hoylake,” her hometown outside Liverpool.36

  Shell-shocked, Cynthia suddenly fell ill. Her mother flew back to England as their Italian hosts pampered Cynthia with hot drinks and cold flannels. In an Italian newspaper, she saw photos of John and Yoko attending the opening night of In His Own Write, which dates this Italian trip to mid-June.37 When she recovered, she went straight to Montagu Street, where her mother was staying. There she found flowers her husband had sent to mock her mum. “Beat you to it, Lil,” John’s card read, meaning he had beat her to the apartment. “Hours after I arrived an envelope was delivered by hand,” Cynthia says. “The letter inside it informed me that John was suing me for divorce on the grounds of my adultery with Robert Bassanini. Presumably Alex had told John I had been out with him [in Italy].”38

  There are plenty of ways in which Cynthia and John were incompatible, many of which their own friends in art school spoke of quite openly when they first started going out. But for Lennon to accuse Cynthia of adultery at this point reeks of emotional abuse larded on top of years of physical and psychological selfishness. Through Peter Brown at the Apple offices, Cynthia tried to reach John for weeks after she returned, but he refused to take her calls. Then Brown gave Cynthia the message that with Lennon engrossed in recording sessions, they should swap living quarters: John and Yoko moved back into the London flat, and Cynthia, Julian, and his grandmother returned to Kenwood. It was no small irony that Lennon—without even speaking to his wife—sought to sail through a season of international turmoil by escaping into a new relationship, a future symbol of rock romance, that in personal terms cost him at least as much self-respect as he had already spent. For his dual duties as loyal emissary, Lennon began to imitate Elvis, presenting Magic Alex with a brand-new white Mercedes.39

  Cynthia’s role in John Lennon’s life tends to get short shrift. She was upstaged and outflanked in so many ways that our media-filtered understanding of her is necessarily warped, even after she wrote two books. Removing her successor from the equation, she comes across much differently. Cynthia anchored Lennon with consistent affection and understanding, bore him a son, and stayed committed through all of Beatlemania’s many personal indignities. To toss her aside with such contempt only meant that his Beatle fame, which Lennon had unveiled as transparently hollow on Sgt. Pepper, had a corrupting effect on the way he treated those closest to him. In this rarefied and pampered sphere, his focus narrowed to one of exclusive self-interest, to the point where even fatherhood, where one might have expected some sensitivity, crumbled. Had Cynthia done anything remotely like this to him, Lennon could have added such cruelty to his roster of victimhood. As it was, the emotional inertia of his own hurt and misguided urges was all that he seemed to care about.

  Chapter 17

  How?

  From May 1968, when they first began living together, until September 1973, when they publicly split up for eighteen months, John and Yoko were inseparable. Lennon positioned them as two intense artists who needed each other so badly that all other concerns became secondary, and they projected a hyped-up mixture of mutual obsession, creative reciprocity, and narcissistic oblivion. His public face read romantic delirium, but the overlapping political agendas Lennon pursued as the Beatles worked on Let It Be and Abbey Road were unguardedly selfish, and Ono became a clever, not to say cynical, decoy to his withdrawal from the band. History ladles irony on this moment: the band that had once literally slept on top of one another in Neil Aspinall’s van now sought to pool all their collective business interests just as their two most productive songwriters formed new families. For added curiosity, both new Beatle wives had non-British upbringings.

  After leaving her first husband in Tucson, Arizona, Linda Eastman returned to the East Coast with her daughter, Heather, and became a rock photographer with a colorful reputation in the scene’s elite boys’ club. Like Ono, she came from a well-to-do background that bespoke education and worldliness. Her mother, Louise Sara Lindner Eastman, was heir to the Lindner Department Store fortune; her father, born Lee Epstein, practiced entertainment law at his own firm in Manhattan while collecting modern art. They raised four children in Scarsdale, New York, and, like many other Russian Jewish emigrant offspring, had gradually assimilated into mainstream New York life.

  McCartney’s on-again, off-again engagement to Jane Asher, which had greased tabloid sales for months, finally crashed when Asher returned early from a theatrical job to find McCartney cavorting with another American, Francie Schwartz (“Frannie”), that summer of 1968. (While staying at McCartney’s during that same period, John and Yoko watched TV in the evenings with her. One day they returned to find a card on the mantelpiece in Paul’s familiar handwriting, which read: “You and your Jap tart think you’re hot shit.” When Lennon confronted McCartney, his partner laughe
d it off, saying he’d done it “on a lark.” Within a few days, John and Yoko moved on.)1 McCartney had already met Eastman at the Bag O’ Nails club in 1967 when she was on assignment photographing “Swinging London,” and again at a Procol Harum concert at the Speakeasy.

  When he spoke with Linda next, at Epstein’s Sgt. Pepper party in May 1967, Linda took some famous photographs of the band in full psychedelic regalia, standing at Epstein’s fireplace. McCartney began pursuing her seriously during the summer of 1968, soon after Lennon became obsessed with Ono—both Beatles were drawn to women whose intellectual pursuits in the past differentiated them from an endless bevy of groupies. These romances have enough of a tit-for-tat quality to suggest how much Lennon and McCartney’s intimate pursuits were entangled with their musical one-upmanship.

  Lennon and McCartney expressed these tensions throughout the band’s final eighteen months together with varying degrees of sincerity and prevarication. The received line on this period is how everything worked to pull Lennon and McCartney—and the Beatles—apart. But the music conveys a different story: despite their differing personalities and writing sensibilities, the band became their rallying point, and every ensemble impulse held them together even as they composed from separate orbits. Nightfall and bemused introspection mark Lennon’s “Good Night,” “Cry Baby Cry,” and McCartney’s “Blackbird,” as well as twilight duets like “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and “Because,” where romantic themes double as songs about male bonding and reluctant farewells. In these songs, the Beatles pushed rock into a new maturity, where teenage-identity themes became larger metaphors for fraught intimacy (“Two of Us,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “You Never Give Me Your Money,” “Carry That Weight”). If their financial disputes created havoc, the music always pulled them back together even when they were at loggerheads. Divergent interests only quickened their ensemble. Creating alliances amid all the tension turned into an imposing late theme, as they proved themselves their own biggest fans: nobody had more trouble putting this career to bed than the Beatles themselves.