John Lennon: The Life (61 page)

Terry Doran was his other main companion through these Thousand-and-One Acid Nights. A curly-haired Liverpudlian, easygoing and charming, Doran had come into the Beatles’ circle as Brian’s partner in a luxury car retail business, Brydor Ltd., based in Hounslow, Middlesex. He would later be George’s personal assistant, but in this period belonged mainly to the Lennon camp, acting as a driver-protector to John and, equally, a friend, ego booster—even occasional escort—to Cynthia. So much a fixture was he at Kenwood that, even if John happened to be around, Julian would often prefer Terry to put him to bed.

Not everyone found the effects of drugs on John as deleterious as did his wife. “I thought he was someone whom pot and acid turned around in a good way,” John Dunbar says. “To start with, they took him off the drink, which meant a lot of that old chippy aggression seemed to disappear. They also gave him a concern for other people that he’d never had to have as a selfish, self-centered pop star. I remember once, in the middle of a trip, he must have noticed me looking scared or worried. ‘It’s all right, man, don’t worry,’ he said to me. ‘We’re all the same, we’re all scared….’ I don’t think he’d have been capable of sensitivity like that before he took acid.”

None of the Beatles now bore any resemblance to their former touring, smiling-and-bowing selves. On a recent trip back to Liverpool, Paul had been riding a moped around his old childhood haunts and had fallen off, badly gashing his upper lip. To hide the scar, he grew a mustache in the newly modish downturned style hitherto associated with Mexican revolutionaries. With their usual solidarity, the other three also instantly sprouted facial hair, in Ringo’s case a matching “Zapata,” in George’s something closer to a Vandyke beard. John, however, opted for a mustache of more wayward shape whose ends meandered all the way down to his jawline. He had kept
his hair short after playing Private Gripweed, and also retained the once-hated round-framed National Health glasses. The effect was not so much of a pop star or hippie mystic as some rather prim Victorian ledger clerk.

Underneath, he still seemed the same incorrigible japester, ever ready to undercut the most earnest hippiespeak with a daft pun, and turn even the sacred acid precept of “ego death” into slapstick. But when Klaus Voormann visited Kenwood, not long after designing the
Revolver
cover, he received a surprise glimpse behind the usually uncrackable Lennon facade. “John played me some music, then we went for a walk in the garden. He was really down, uptight, he was staring into the distance…then it all came pouring out. He had this wife he didn’t want to be with…he said how he was in despair, how he wanted to disappear, just go into the ground. As he was telling me, he started to rip the leaves off a bush and throw them on the grass. He was so upset, he didn’t realise he was tearing it to pieces. I said ‘John, don’t take it out on the bush, the bush didn’t do anything…’ He laughed at that, and seemed to feel a bit better.”

As Paul had requested, John Dunbar still kept all the out-of-town Beatles informed about forthcoming events at the Indica Gallery. Not long after John’s return from Spain, he received the catalog of an exhibition be to held there early in November. The artist already enjoyed enough renown to be billed simply as “Yoko at Indica,” suggesting something rather more than merely paintings or static pieces of sculpture. “Dunbar told me about this Japanese girl from New York, who was going to be in a bag, doing this event or happening,” John would recall. “I thought ‘Hmm’”—you know—“‘Sex.’”

His curiosity aroused, he arranged with Dunbar to drop by on the evening of November 9, 1966, the day before the show’s official opening. Les Anthony was summoned to drive him up from Weybridge in his Mini Cooper, for once unaccompanied by any minders or followers. He was “in a highly unshaven and tatty state,” he later said, having not slept for three nights previously. “I was always up in those days, tripping. I was stoned.”

T
he woman destined to transform the rest of John’s life was born in Tokyo on February 18, 1933. Japanese family names precede given ones, so until her late teens she was known as Ono Yoko. The kanji word
ko
means “child,” and Yoko can translate as either Ocean Child or Positive Child. This particular infant, certainly, was to know little self-doubt and traverse many oceans, weathering tidal waves of hostility and misunderstanding along the way.

Like John’s, Yoko’s early years were dominated by class and, like him, she was to construct a public persona far removed from her true origins. Through her mother, Isoko, she belonged to one of Japan’s four wealthiest commercial families, or
zaibatsu
, the Yasudas. Her great-grandfather Zenjiro Yasuda rose from poor samurai antecedents to make a fortune from currency dealing in the late nineteenth
century, and eventually to found the Third National Bank of Japan. Zenjiro was a nationally admired figure, a gifted musician and poet, far ahead of his time in always acknowledging an equal partnership with his diminutive wife. They were so inspirational a couple that offices and shops throughout the country used to display a wood block etched with their likeness. Zenjiro’s death in 1921 was to have a horrible resonance for the great-granddaughter he never knew. One day in his garden he spared a few moments to talk to a young man who was collecting funds for a workers’ hostel. When Zenjiro declined to make a contribution, the young man assassinated him.

Yoko’s father, Eisuke Ono, came from a family that had produced many notable painters, musicians, and academics—and also, in his mother, Tsuruko, one of Japan’s pioneering feminists. Tall, handsome Eisuko was himself a gifted classical pianist, but chose a career in banking rather than the one he might well have had on the international concert stage. After his marriage into the Yasudas, his social status demanded that he should be taken to work each morning in a chauffeur-driven limousine. Embarrassed by such ostentation, he would stop the car a couple of blocks from his office and walk the rest of the way.

Isoko, Yoko’s mother, was a stunning beauty, a much-praised painter, and a famous hostess whose photograph appeared constantly in Japanese society magazines. Both her family and Eisuke’s were widely traveled, multilingual, and highly westernized, the men playing golf in plus fours and Argyll socks, the women chic in the latest Parisian gowns, hats, and furs. It was an era of seemingly unstoppable amity between Japan and America, with emigrants by the hundred thousand crossing the Pacific from the former to the latter, and ever-strengthening business and financial links. Just before Yoko’s birth, Eisuke accepted a position in his bank’s San Francisco branch, leaving Isoko behind in Tokyo. Yoko did not meet him until she was two, and for many years afterward only at long intervals. The transpacific journey in that era was most commonly made by ship. On the first voyage to see her father, she took part in a fancy-dress parade costumed as the moppet film star Shirley Temple, and won first prize.

As part of the Yasuda clan, she enjoyed a life of extraordinary privilege and luxury. Voluminous home movies still in her possession show a cute little girl with bobbed hair, immaculately turned out in sailor suits or Scottish kilts with matching tam o’shanters beside her fashion-plate mother. Because of the Yasudas’ close relationships with successive emperors, she was allowed to attend the Gakashuin, or Peers’ School, an establishment normally reserved for children of the imperial family or senior members of the House of Peers. The family kept thirty servants, including a governess to instruct her in all the labyrinthine points of social and feminine etiquette. Servants had to come into her presence on their knees, and depart from it on their knees backward. On excursions into the outside world, she was not allowed to sit on any public seat until a servant had cleansed it with disinfectant-soaked cotton wool.

Despite this cossetting, her childhood was solitary and insecure. Thanks to her family’s wealth and eminence, few children her age were deemed suitable to play with her. Every summer, Isoko would pack her off to the family’s big country house in the charge of her governess while her brother Keisuke, three years her junior, stayed in Tokyo with their mother. Like some medieval infanta, Yoko would eat her meals alone, with her governess seated nearby murmuring precepts about manners or deportment. Desperate for company, she would sometimes creep to the servants’ quarters and eavesdrop on their conversations. Once she overheard a young housemaid describe the process of childbirth to workmates, complete with harrowing sound effects. The melodramatic shrieks and groans lodged in Yoko’s mind, to surface many years later as her own special brand of singing.

Imagination became her only refuge in the big, lonely house. To stave off her terror of the dark, she would stage a play with chess pieces for characters or arrange objects on her coverlet in the same meaningless but reassuring patterns. But whereas most solitary children keep their fantasies secret, Yoko always felt a powerful urge to communicate hers. “When I was in this summer place by myself, the only playmate I had was the caretaker’s daughter, who was about two years older than me,” she remembers. “We would go to the fruit
orchard and I’d take an apple seed and a pear seed and plant them together, to see if the fruit that came up was half apple, half pear. Then I would tell the girl to write it down. I was always thinking ‘I have to tell the world of my discoveries.’”

The outbreak of war with America, and consequently Britain, in 1941 was a traumatic event for cultured, Western-leaning Japanese like the Onos. Although her father was still far from home, now working in French Indochina, Yoko’s life at first remained largely untouched by danger or hardship. She remembers parties given by her mother, where beautifully dressed men and women danced to gramophones with the same hectic, damn-tomorrow gaiety as others far across the seas in London, Berlin, and Liverpool.

By 1945, Japan had been defeated on every overseas front and the Americans were bombing Tokyo in preparation for their finale over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a single night, the waves of B-29 Super-fortresses set sixteen square miles ablaze, killing a hundred thousand people. Eisuke Ono was now in an internment camp in Hanoi. Reluctant to leave Tokyo herself, Isoko sent her children to safety in the countryside with a handicapped servant who had escaped call-up to essential war work. The country people exploited the city refugees without mercy, forcing them to trade their expensive clothes and possessions for meager portions of rice or vegetables, often taking the possessions, then refusing to hand over the food. The servant, as a fellow peasant, received kindlier treatment, the more so if she distanced herself from her charges. Twelve-year-old Yoko thus found herself effectively the guardian of her brother and her toddler sister, Setsuko. Their mother tried to keep them supplied with basics, like miso paste to make soup, but they often went hungry. To distract her two siblings, Yoko would conjure sumptuous feasts from her imagination.

Despite having been hit with two atomic bombs, postwar Japan under American occupation recovered with a speed that made Europe—especially threadbare, food-rationed Britain—gape in resentful disbelief. And despite losing overall grip on industry and finance, the
zaibatsu
still retained much of their old power. When Yoko entered Gakashuin University, the combined prestige of the Yasudas
and intellectualism of the Onos seemed to guarantee her choice of brilliant careers. She was the university’s first-ever philosophy student, was gifted in languages and literature as well as the visual arts, and, like her father, was an accomplished pianist. With a view to the performing career Eisuke had been denied, she also studied music, specializing in German lieder and Italian opera.

Unfortunately, this talented student also possessed a rebellious spirit still extremely uncommon among young Japanese women of her class. Although hugely self-confident on the surface, she remained haunted by childhood insecurities, in particular the guilt she had always felt about her privileged station in life. “My father wanted me to be a concert pianist, but I wasn’t good enough. As a painter in the conventional style, I used to feel overshadowed by my mother. I knew I couldn’t be a linguist like my uncles; I didn’t like the way they put foreign phrases into everything they said. So all the doors were closed on me. I had to find my own way.”

When she was eighteen, the family moved to America to join Eisuke, who had been appointed president of the Bank of Tokyo in New York. They settled in Scarsdale, and Yoko entered Sarah Lawrence College, near Bronxville, to continue her studies in philosophy, music composition, and literature. Sarah Lawrence, in those days an all-female college, had a reputation for fostering individualism and radicalism, positively relishing the idea that its alumnae might go out into the world as “troublemakers.” But Yoko’s developing theories about music, writing, and the visual arts soon had even this most liberal of young ladies’ seminaries scratching its collective head. She dropped out after three years, having been advised by a friendly professor that she might find more sympathetic eyes and ears in the art world of downtown New York.

Her parents had hoped that art and music would be no more than graceful pastimes, and that in due course she would make a suitable marriage and turn into a conventional, dutiful Japanese American wife. One of Japan’s wealthiest men wrote formally to her father, in the traditional manner, proposing his son as a husband for her. But Yoko would have none of it and, aged twenty-three, eloped with a Japanese-born composer-pianist named Toshi Ichiyanagi, who had
been studying at the Juilliard School of Music. Without a backward glance, she exchanged her family’s palatial homes for a cold-water artist’s loft in Greenwich Village, and her extensive childhood wardrobe for allover bohemian black.

Here, as her college teacher had prophesied, she quickly found empathetic spirits. By the early Sixties, she had become associated with the Fluxus group, a multiethnic circle of artists unusual for that time in not confining themselves to a single medium but amalgamating the disciplines of painting, sculpture, photography, music, poetry, film, and theatre. Taking Marcel Duchamp as their god, Fluxus members abhorred so-called high art, choosing as their subject matter the most familiar, even banal, components of everyday life. Their moving spirit, Lithuanian-born George Maciunas, proclaimed their mission to “purge the world of bourgeois sickness, intellectual, professional, and commercialized culture…Purge the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, mathematical art…Promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art. Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON ART REALITY.”

Under this doctrine, the personality and political agenda of the artist became as important as the work, or more so, and the audience response a crucial part of its realization. Fluxus events combined shock with deadpan humor: spectators would find they had bought tickets simply to sit and watch an alarm clock tick on an empty stage or a group of artists make a salad together. The emblematic event was John Cage’s
4',33",
in which a pianist sat at a keyboard without touching it for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The “music” was the puzzled fidgeting and whispering of the customers as they waited in vain for something to happen.

Yoko became the epitome of Fluxus multimedia antiart. Her works tended to be sculpture, or rather three-dimensional collage, assembled from quotidian objects and usually inviting physical contact with the observer. Sometimes the creation would be a piece of theatre, with the role of the artwork played by the artist and the audience’s reactions serving to illuminate some truth about the nature of art or the human condition in general. George Maciunas called her technique “neo Haiku theatre”; the art historian Ken Friedman defined it as “Zen vaudeville.”

She began to acquire a reputation for audacity rivaling Cage’s, and additionally spiced with a certain sexual frisson. In her
Cut Piece
event—first staged in Japan in 1964, and later at other important venues, including New York’s Carnegie Hall—she sat alone onstage, motionless and silent, with a large pair of scissors in front of her. Audience members were invited to come up and each cut off a piece of her clothing until she was down to her underwear. The way in which each individual approached this mute sacrificial victim spoke volumes about human aggression and respect, crudity and delicacy, voyeurism and embarrassment. Also in 1964, she published
Grapefruit
, a book of haiku-length “instructional poems,” which aimed to make words like the commands of musical notation: “Steal a moon on the water with a bucket. Keep stealing until no moon is seen on the water.” “Draw a map to get lost.” “Make all the clocks in the world fast by two seconds without letting anyone know about it.”

Her marriage to Toshi Ichiyanagi did not last, although the two remained mutually admiring and supportive. Ichiyanagi returned to Japan, where he ultimately became one of the country’s best-known composers. With his encouragement, Yoko, too, returned to her homeland to stage a series of shows and exhibitions. Her American press coverage had been generally friendly, but Japanese critics proved harder to impress, one in particular writing a review of devastating personal viciousness. Not accustomed in those days, as she puts it, to “being slashed,” she suffered a breakdown and checked into a clinic for a complete rest. Instead, she was subjected to ceaseless harassment by journalists and commentators intrigued to see someone of her exalted connections in distress. The time was still far off when she would not mind the whole world peering at her in bed.

Among her visitors was a young American filmmaker named Tony Cox, a devotee of her work who had come from New York on the off chance of meeting her. Yoko refused to see him at first, but relented after he left a little pot of flowers every day with her nurse. Cox was extremely handsome, somewhat like the film star Anthony Perkins, and endowed with great charm and persuasiveness. He quickly convinced Yoko that life was worth living, encouraging her to cut down the heavy doses of Valium the clinic was administering and, eventu
ally, to discharge herself. In 1962, she divorced Ichiyanagi and, later that same year, married Cox. Because of a legal technicality, the marriage was annulled in March 1963; they remarried the following June, and two months later Yoko gave birth to a daughter, Kyoko.