The Love You Make (36 page)

One of the vendors was John Alexis Mardas, a thin, twenty-one-year-old Greek youngster with sandy brown hair. The son of a Greek military officer who had just come to power in the recent junta, Alex, as he was called, spoke heavily accented English at breakneck speed, although his tongue tripped over every syllable. His accent, however, was no impediment to his gift for gab. He billed himself as a world traveler and electronics genius just passing through London on a holiday, although his real story was decidedly less glamorous. Admitted to England on a limited student visa, he claimed that his passport had been stolen from his luggage and had subsequently expired. When he reported this dilemma to the Greek Embassy, an attaché accused him of having sold the passport. In the interim, to feed himself, Alex took an illegal job as a television repairman in the basement of a TV repair service called Olympic Television. About this time, John Dunbar, through his ever-widening circle, got to know Alex and decided his knowledge of electricity and electronics could be put to good use. Kinetic art and sculpture were all the rage, and a young artist named Takis had recently made a fortune with a show comprised of kinetic light sculptures. Dunbar suggested that Alex go into business with him, and Dunbar became his “agent.” Alex’s first project was a box filled with flashing lights, covered in a transparent membrane. They called it a “psychedelic light box”—a brand-new idea at the time—and sold it to the Rolling Stones, who immediately added it to their act. Brian Jones, the Stones’ doomed, baby-faced lead guitarist, took a special liking to Alex. It was through Brian Jones that Alex was introduced to the Beatles, first John, then George.

Both Beatles, by now wary of loquacious strangers with grand designs, were completely taken up with Alex’s charms. He was a fascinating companion. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of an endless variety of subjects. For George he spun stories and lectures on India, mysticism, and religion. For John he was full of ideas for magic inventions, incredible things he had figured out how to make: air colored with light, artificial laser suns that would hang in the night sky, a force field that would keep fans away, and wallpaper that was actually a paper-thin stereo speaker. One day, when Alex brought John a plastic box filled with Christmas tree lights that did nothing but blink on and off randomly until the battery ran down and the thing blinked itself to death, John was thrilled. It was the best gift an LSD freak could want. In thanks, John elevated him to the royal circle as the Beatles’ court sorcerer and dubbed him “Magic Alex.” John also solved Alex’s work and immigration problems with a phone call to me. I was asked to make arrangements through an attorney for Alex’s legal immigration to Great Britain.

Magic Alex made Cynthia Lennon’s skin crawl the moment she met him. He radiated trouble to her. It wasn’t that she disbelieved the fantastic promises of inventions, it was his possessiveness of John. No one could know better what a fierce competitor he was for John’s attention. Although it was decidedly not sexual, Alex courted John like any female power-and-stardom groupie she had ever observed at work around the Beatles. He became John’s unshakeable, constant companion. He was always polite and considerate to Cynthia, but she nevertheless watched carefully for the day Alex might try to stab her in the back.

On November 9 I
could no longer put off the worried phone calls from our English tour promoter, Arthur Howes, about booking future Beatles’ concerts. Brian, who couldn’t bear to admit the truth, finally called Howes and told him that the Beatles would no longer accept any bookings. Within the hour word leaked out to the press, and the office was deluged with calls. It was reported in most papers the next day that the Beatles intended to exist solely as recording artists. No entertainment act had ever attempted this before, and the implication of many of the articles was that that was the first step in their long-expected demise.

While Brian and I were on the phone with various reporters, assuring them that the Beatles were far from having broken up, John Dunbar was on the phone with John Lennon, who was crumpled on the curved sofa on the sunporch at Kenwood. He had been up for three consecutive days, tripping on LSD, and he had not washed or shaved in seventy-two hours. Dunbar wanted John to come to a private preview that night of a show opening at the Indica. Dunbar’s description of the show sounded very sexual to John, vaguely like an orgy. There were to be all these beautiful young people lying around in a big bag or something. The exhibit was titled “Unfinished Paintings and Objects by Yoko Ono.” John agreed to go.

Later that evening, at about ten o’clock, John arrived at the Indica in his chauffeur-driven Mini. Dunbar met him at the door of the gallery and took him around to see the exhibit. It was unlike anything John had ever seen before. The displays were so simple and arbitrary that it seemed some sort of put-on. There was an ordinary apple on a pedestal with a £200 price tag on it. John assumed one paid £200 for the privilege of watching the apple decompose. There was also a stepladder with a spyglass attached to the top step with a chain. If you climbed the ladder and looked at a circled spot on the ceiling, you could read the word “Yes” printed in a tiny scrawl. And there was a board with several nails hammered partially into it, with a note that said, “Hammer A Nail In.”

Dunbar led John downstairs to the basement to see the live part of the exhibition. Several long-haired young men and women were sitting around the floor, darning the rips in a large canvas bag. Dunbar went across the room to get the artist. “Go and say hello to the millionaire,” Dunbar whispered pointedly to her, and presently a remarkable figure appeared before John.

She was a tiny Japanese woman, less than five feet tall, dressed in black pants and a tatty black sweater. She had a very pale, grim-looking face, set off by two thick columns of black hair that streamed over her breasts nearly to her waist. Her name was Yoko Ono.

“Where’s the orgy?” John asked her, slightly disappointed that nothing sexual was happening. Wordlessly, she handed John a card. On it was printed the word “breathe.” “You mean like this?” John said, and panted. The small Japanese woman seemed unimpressed.

They wandered around the exhibit together, Dunbar speaking for the two of them. When John asked if he could hammer a nail into one of the boards, Yoko said no. The exhibit didn’t officially open until the next day, and she didn’t want it tampered with. Dunbar was embarrassed. “Let him hammer a nail in. Who knows, he might buy it,” he encouraged. After a short conference with Dunbar, Yoko agreed to allow John to hammer a nail in—for five shillings.

John was both irked and amused. He’d take her up on her game. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings, and I’ll hammer in an imaginary nail.”

Yoko Ono finally smiled.

Yoko Ono—her name means “Ocean Child”—was born in Tokyo on February 18, 1934, the eldest daughter of a prominent banker and a cold, aristocratic mother. Her mother’s socially conscious family, the Yasudas, were, according to Yoko, the Japanese equivalents of the Rothschilds or the Rockefellers, and they resented her mother’s marriage to her bourgeois father. Yoko herself was never very close to her father, who moved to San Francisco to head a branch of the Yokohama Speci-Bank before she was born. She didn’t really get to know him until she and her mother joined him in San Francisco in 1936. The Onos lived in San Francisco and New York for four years, until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made the family less than welcome in America, and they were sent back to their native country, a matter of no small bitterness to them.

Back in Japan, Yoko and her younger brother and sister moved to a farmhouse her mother had rented in the countryside for their safety away from the wartime cities, but when they arrived at the farmhouse it turned out to be just a shack, with no food or supplies. Yoko’s mother went back to Tokyo, leaving her children with the servants, who soon abandoned them, penniless. Yoko was forced to forage for food and clothing for herself and her siblings until after the war, when she was reunited with her parents.

In 1951, the war over and all forgiven, Yoko’s father was named president of the New York branch of his bank, now renamed the Bank of Tokyo, and the family once again moved to New York, this time to a large house in Scarsdale. Yoko attended three years of college at Sarah Lawrence as a philosophy major before getting bored with the regimentation of school and dropping out. When she was twenty-three, much to her parents’ distress, she eloped with a penniless Japanese composer and pianist named Toschi Ichiyananagi, and her mother promptly cut her off without a penny. It was years before they spoke again.

She stayed married to Ichiyananagi for seven years, living in various cheap apartments in the West Eighties near Riverside Drive. Now an aspiring avant-garde musician and artist herself, her husband encouraged her into composing with him. Trying to gain a foothold in the fast-moving, competitive art world as an avant-garde artist was not easy. For a while she fell in with musicians John Cage and La Monte Young. Her first displayed art was created to be burned or stomped on. In 1960 she had her first show at a small Madison Avenue gallery owned by George Macunias. Macunias was one of the inventors of a live event he called “Fluxus,” the forerunner of the popular “happenings.” Yoko’s show at his gallery was comprised of conceptual art pieces designed with her trademark brand of ironic humor. One of the pieces was called an “eternal time clock,” which was a clock with only a second hand encased in a plastic bubble. The ticking could only be heard through a stethoscope attached to the sculpture. She also presented a stage piece at Carnegie Recital Hall in which as part of the performance performers were strapped together back-to-back and instructed to walk across the stage without making any noise. At another “concert” held at the Village Gate, microphones were hidden in the toilets so the patrons could be heard urinating and flushing on stage.

Try as she might to be different, Yoko was soon swallowed up by the harshly competitive art world. In 1961 she joined her husband in Tokyo, where she staged musical dance programs. “I got terrible reviews,” Yoko remembers. “The conservative elements—men artists and critics—decided to boycott me. The press wrote snide remarks all over the place. I just felt terrible.” When a Tokyo critic accused her of plagiarizing her ideas, she tried to kill herself. “As a teenager I was always trying to cut my wrists or take pills,” she said. “And later… I was always feeling frustrated as an artist. I felt I was not being accepted by society, work-wise.”

When she was twenty-nine she divorced Toschi Ichiyananagi to marry avant-garde artist Tony Cox, whom she met in Japan. On August 8, 1963, a daughter, Kyoko, was born. Yoko didn’t really want to have this baby. She said she wasn’t ready. Her mother had always warned her that marriage and children would ruin her career, but she had already had so many abortions in the fifties that the doctors advised her not to have another, and Kyoko was born. “I thought, ‘Maybe if I have a child, I’ll feel differently,’ because society’s myth is that all women are supposed to have children. But that was a myth. So there was Kyoko, and I did become attached to her and had great love for her, but at the same time I was still struggling to get my own space in the world.”

She moved back to New York with Cox, this time to a cold-water loft decorated with orange crates in the then unfashionable factory district of downtown Manhattan known as Soho. “I felt stifled in New York,” Yoko said. “I wasn’t sure what to do.” Then, in early 1966, an English journalist included her in an article on avant-garde artists published in England. Soon after she and Cox were invited to London to attend a symposium called “The Destruction of Art.” They arrived in London in October of 1966, nearly penniless. As soon as they got to town, she called an old American friend from the art world, Dan Richter, to find a place to stay. Richter got them the flat next door to his in a big Victorian building on Park Row. Yoko emptied the apartment of furniture and spent her last money on carpeting it wall to wall; she said she liked living in the barren space. A few weeks later she met John Lennon at the Indica Gallery.

Yoko’s second meeting with John Lennon was much less memorable than the first. It was at a Claes Oldenburg art opening of soft sculpture. John, stoned as usual on a mixture from his mortar, was wandering past a giant fabric cheeseburger, drinking white wine, when he spotted Yoko across the room, a small, striking figure again dressed entirely in black. They nodded at each other shyly, but both were too embarrassed to speak, and they spent the rest of the evening frozen in place, yards from each other.

One morning weeks later, Yoko turned up in the waiting room of the Beatles’ office, demanding to speak to John. She needed financial sponsorship for one of her conceptual projects; she wanted to wrap one of the lions in Trafalgar Square in canvas. The closest she got to John that day was an accidental encounter with Neil Aspinall. Neil came away from the encounter with the impression she might have been making a play for him. Yoko also managed, in passing, to collar Ringo, but her philosophical and conceptual ramblings about her art were so obscure to Ringo that she might as well have been speaking Japanese to him.

Eventually, she sent John a copy of a little book she had published in a limited edition of 500 copies by the Wunternum Press in Tokyo in 1964 called
Grapefruit.
The book was a collection of “instructional poems.” On each page there was a suggestion: “Draw a map to get lost” or “Smoke everything you can, including your pubic hair” and “Stir inside of your brains with a penis until things are mixed well. Take a walk.” John was at first annoyed by the book, then outraged, and finally amused. So amused he agreed to speak with her. Yoko convinced him to finance her next show at the Lissom Gallery, which was entitled “The Half Wind Show” and which was comprised of half-things: half-a-chair, half-a-bed, half-a-cup. John, cautiously, would not allow his name to be used in the catalog, and the sponsorship of the show was credited only as “Yoko plus me.” Later in the year, he noticed, she had one of her shows at the Saville Theater, where members of the audience came up and cut off pieces of her clothing, while she sat stoic and immobile on the stage. One night he asked her back to Neil Aspinall’s flat, but they only talked. Yoko curled up to sleep on the divan, while John slept alone in the bedroom.