Among the underground elite Ono was a celebrity. Her Fluxus comrades were suspicious of her uncanny knack of attracting publicity and undoubtedly jealous too, but nobody dared to question her ferocious commitment to her work or the energy she devoted to the cause of constant creativity.
Although some chroniclers have chosen to portray Ono as a monomaniac who relentlessly pursued Lennon for his wealth and fame, there is little evidence that she regarded him as anything other than that most valuable of assets for any experimental artist, a wealthy patron. She was nowhere near as innocent of his fame as she liked to suggest, but as she admitted later, 'I didn't find a lot of sympathy for, or interest in, rock music in the avant-garde scene that I was in. Quite the opposite, in fact. There was quite a pride in not becoming part of the rock scene, because it was too commercial. Fluxus was the furthermost experimental group of its time, and rock was just . . .' She waved her hand in a gesture of contempt.
Once established, the rapport between Ono and Lennon remained fluid and intense. She supplied him with a steady stream of schemes, manifestos and concepts that were dazzling in their simplicity and power, and Lennon responded in kind. As the Beatles were preparing their Indian expedition in February 1968, he allowed himself to envisage taking not only his wife, but also Ono, as an intellectual companion.
At Kenwood three months later Ono arrived in a taxi, Shotton paid the driver (Lennon, like the Queen, never carried cash) and the two artists muttered small talk until Shotton took the hint. At which point the Lennon/Ono mythology takes over, and we have only their word for the oft-told story that they retired to Lennon's home studio, recorded their first experimental music (subsequently released as the Apple album Two Virgins) and made love at dawn. 'It was beautiful,' Lennon always insisted. 'I was such a snob at the time,' Ono admitted decades later, 'and I thought [ John's] contribution to Two Virgins tended towards not being abstract enough, the sounds that he made – it was more vaudeville, I thought.' Familiar with a milieu in which collaboration was commonplace, Ono failed to sense that anything unusual had occurred. Lennon felt like a prisoner reprieved from the gallows.
The next morning he told Shotton, 'This is it. This is what I've been waiting for all my life. Fuck everything. Fuck the Beatles. Fuck money. I'll go and live with her in a fucking tent if I have to.' Even allowing for poetic exaggeration, his liaison with Ono seems to have marked an epochal moment in his life. Aside from her erotic charms (and sexual imagery filled his songs for the next year, from 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun' to 'Come Together'), Ono liberated Lennon's creativity. 'She had a galvanising effect,' Shotton confirmed. 'She wasn't just the love of his life; she convinced him he was an artist, which he'd always wanted to be. You could even say that Yoko brought John back to life.' The effect was mutual.
Lennon had maintained a healthy scepticism towards experimental art, not least because it was McCartney's area of expertise. Though he never reached Harrison's level of cynicism – 'Avant-garde is short for haven't got a clue' – he harboured an innate distrust of any art that imposed a distance between its creator and its audience. He instinctively felt dishonest when masking his emotions behind wordplay or surrealism (as on the deliberately obtuse 'I Am the Walrus'). What was remarkable about Ono was the accessibility and directness of her work. Her concepts were simple to grasp: you either accepted or rejected them. Moreover, Ono believed that creativity was a way of life, not a matter of waiting for inspiration. Under her influence, it was no longer enough to produce art: Lennon had to become an Artist, whose every act would betray his ethos and emotion.
First there was another betrayal to enact, as he allowed Cynthia to discover him and Ono in the kitchen at Kenwood. For a few days he avoided further confrontation by pretending that his marriage could be saved. Then, having encouraged Cynthia to leave the country for a recuperative holiday, he escorted Ono to the opening of a theatrical adaptation of his own books. 'Where's your wife?' reporters shouted at him. 'I don't know,' he replied, which wasn't strictly true, as he had paid for her to visit Italy, where she read reports of his public appearance with Ono and was then visited by Alexis Mardas, who told her that Lennon wanted a divorce on the grounds of her (non-existent) adultery. Lennon eventually relented, and admitted his own offence to speed the process of legal separation. It was not one of the most courageous episodes of his life.
Until now, no hint of the Beatles' exotic love life – the teenage conquests on tour, the casual infidelities – had appeared in the press. As Lennon noted in 1970, the media had a vested interest in letting the circus continue, as male journalists were often able to exploit the girls who had not made it as far as the Beatles' beds. The group's public image remained impeccable: Lennon and Starkey had married their teenage sweethearts (both of whom were pregnant at the time); Harrison had secured that talisman of the age, a blonde model; and McCartney was linked with one of Britain's most talented actresses. Ono's arrival punctured the illusion that the Beatles were eccentric but still dependably decent. Not only was Ono a married woman consorting with a married man, she was linked in the public imagination with nudity, she didn't match up to English conventions of beauty and, worst of all, she was Japanese at a time when that was virtually a synonym for the extreme cruelty inflicted on prisoners of war little more than twenty years earlier. Many British people who would have regarded themselves as tolerant made an exception for the Japanese, who were widely felt to be slitty-eyed, merciless and sadistic. 'I can understand how they felt,' Ono admitted in retrospect. 'It's just that I was totally naive about all that.'
When Cynthia Lennon saw Ono and Lennon in June, some of those stereotypes were inescapable. She remembered Ono 'beside him in the chair, shrouded by her hair, her face set in an expressionless mask', the epitome of the inscrutable oriental. Moreover, 'I barely recognised John. It had only been a few weeks since we last met, but he was thinner, almost gaunt . . . He was quite simply not the John I knew. It was as if he'd taken on a different persona.' Mrs Lennon asked the question that would soon be repeated around the world: 'What power does she have over him?'
Lennon would have welcomed the idea that he had taken on a different persona. He had thrown himself headlong into Ono's concept of art. They had staged a simple show, Four Thoughts, at the Arts Lab in London, and then clashed with the curators of Coventry Cathedral when they wished to contribute to an exhibition of sculpture within the cathedral precincts. As adulterers, they were forced to plant their symbolic acorns ('This is what happens when two clouds meet') outside consecrated ground. Lennon was using Ono's language in Ono's medium, his own ego submerged in hers. 'It brought out the child in him again,' Pete Shotton said of their relationship: both the child who sees the simple truth behind adult concealment, and the child who does as his parent asks. Ono was seven years older than Lennon, but age mattered less than character: for all her girlish inarticulacy in public, she had a core of steel and the courage of self-belief. Cynthia Lennon drew an obvious parallel: 'Aunt Mimi. John had grown up in the shadow of a domineering woman – it was what he knew and was most familiar with . . . Yoko offered the security of a mother figure who always knew best.' For Lennon, Aunt Mimi had represented security after the disappearance of his parents, but also rejection of the rebellious rock 'n' roller and satirical artist he became in his teens. Ono, by contrast, offered direction and approval; and Lennon reacted as if he had miraculously found his way home.
As the part-owner of his own (still dormant) record company, Lennon wanted to celebrate his love in public. He told EMI that he planned to launch Apple Records with an album of the tapes he had made with Ono. He was reminded that he had signed an exclusive recording deal with EMI. The album could appear under Ono's name alone, or under a pseudonym (Lennon suggested Doris and Peter). Still functioning mentally in the world of Fluxus rather than the Beatles, Ono said that she would prefer the record to appear in a signed limited edition for their friends. But she regretted that it would not find a wider audience 'because the mess
age is going to be so beautiful that it could light up the world'.
The other Beatles had become used to Lennon's volatility, the abrupt changes of direction, the near-manic descent from exhilaration to despair, the competitiveness that could spill into open combat. 'They always had a very healthy rivalry,' recalls press officer Tony Barrow, 'but it turned vicious, more barbed. They always used to take potshots at each other, and at us. John vented his spleen with everyone, in and out of the group. They were like brothers: they had fierce fights, but they still loved each other. But in the late 1960s brotherly love went out of the window.'
Brotherly love in the widest sense was what sealed the partnership between Lennon and McCartney. Lennon might be the more aggressive and sarcastic of the pair, McCartney the more subtle, but as long as the partnership held, the Beatles could continue. Now, on 30 May 1968, the group reconvened at Abbey Road Studios to begin what proved to be a six-month process of chaos and creation. The result was a double album entitled The Beatles (alias the 'White Album'), which was their most diverse and, arguably, most rewarding work: a kaleidoscopic collage of reckless eclecticism which also operated as a history of 20th-century popular music, from vaudeville to the avant-garde. But the music, which sounded so zestful and anarchic, was the product of sessions so dispiriting that they sapped the Beatles of their collective identity.
Many factors combined to disturb the sessions. George Harrison was still convinced that Western music paled alongside the glory that was India. In addition, he resented being treated like an errant pupil by Paul McCartney. 'It was essential for me,' McCartney insisted. 'Looking back on it, I think, OK. Well, it was bossy, but it was also ballsy of me.' Yet his parental attitude, intended to benefit the music, left its scars. One observer reckoned, 'Ringo would rather have quit the band than go through Fat-Face McCartney's daily torture trip,' and Harrison only survived because 'he enjoyed teasing Paul'. In August Starkey left for two weeks, unwilling to face the pressure of constant sniping from McCartney and the heightened tension among his three closest friends. Recording engineer Geoff Emerick, who had worked with the Beatles for five years, also walked out ('the atmosphere was poisonous'), while producer George Martin – who had rarely missed a session until then – opted to take a prolonged holiday.
The tone was set at the first session, in May. Lennon arrived desperate to record 'Revolution', his commentary on the recent student protests in Paris. With him was Yoko Ono, silent and enigmatic. 'I remember being very freaked out,' Starkey recalled. 'The four of us had been through a lot together and we were very close, most of the time. We were very possessive of each other, in a way. Wives and girlfriends never came to the studio. That was when we were together. So Yoko came in. And that was fine when we all said hello to her, cos she was with John. But then she was sitting in the studio on his amp.' The amplifier assumed mammoth proportions in the other Beatles' minds. 'It was fairly off-putting,' McCartney said. 'You wanted to say, "Excuse me, love, can I turn the volume up?" We were always wondering how to say, "Could you get off my amp?" without interfering with their relationship.' The inference was that Ono was disturbing McCartney's intimacy with Lennon. 'It was our careers,' he insisted. 'We were the Beatles, after all, and here was this girl.'
'This girl', the one McCartney called 'love', began to assume that Lennon's entourage was also working for her. 'She was soon treating me like a servant to order about,' Shotton recollected. 'That's when it got hard. She rubbed lots of other people up the wrong way.' McCartney complained that Ono continually called the group 'Beatles' rather than 'The Beatles': 'We said, "The Beatles, actually, love".' It's tempting to imagine Lennon recognising McCartney's annoyance and goading Ono to say it again just for the pleasure of seeing anger flash across his colleague's face. Yet Ono picked up no hint of antagonism from McCartney. 'Paul has been very nice to me,' she confided to her tape recorder in May 1968. 'I feel like he's my younger brother or
something. I'm sure that if he had been a woman or something, he would have been a great friend, because there's something definitely very strong between John and Paul.' That empathy would soon be put to the test.
'Suddenly we were together all the time,' Lennon said, 'sort of in a corner mumbling and giggling together, and doing Two Virgins, and there were Paul, George and Ringo saying, "What the hell are they doing? What's happened to him?" And my attention completely went off them. Now, it wasn't deliberate. It was just that I was so involved and intrigued with what we were doing. I understand how they felt.'
It suited Lennon's friends to blame Ono for the disruption. Harrison believed that 'she didn't really like us, because she saw the Beatles as something that was between her and John. The vibe I picked up was that she was a wedge that was trying to drive itself deeper and deeper between him and us, and it actually happened.' Shotton agreed: 'Unfortunately her possessiveness and jealousy or insecurity, call it what you will, meant that she couldn't bear to see John enjoying a close rapport with anyone but herself.' He witnessed her mutating 'from being a timid little mouse into a tiger, insisting on being with John at all times'. McCartney said, 'It was like we were her courtiers, and it was very embarrassing.'
Ono's account was very different. She recalled that Lennon was desperate to possess every moment of her day. 'If I go to the bathroom, he was upset that I closed the bathroom [door]. Is there anything going on in there that he should not know?' She insisted that it was Lennon's decision that she should come to the studio, not once but every day from May 1968 until the final Beatles session 15 months later. 'I was just trying to sit there quietly without disturbing them,' she says. 'John always wanted me there, and if I was not there, John might not have gone to those sessions.' What frustrated her was that she was not asked to participate in the sessions: 'I'm a composer. I want to make my own music, and I'm just sitting there.' Lennon told a record company executive that Ono ignored small talk: 'You must understand that she communicates through the canvas. If you want to talk with her, you have to take out a paintbrush and make a sketch. If you knew her inner self, this would make sense to you.' The Beatles could have tried to establish an artistic rapport with Ono, but this strategy would have been fraught with difficulties. She recalled that if she accidentally sat too close to one of the other Beatles, especially McCartney, Lennon would immediately pull her aside and demand to know what was going on. He was scared that the other Beatles might seduce her away, while they simply wanted her to leave.
For anyone who regarded the continued creativity of the Beatles as more important than the happiness and security of one of its members, Ono's incursion into the recording process was a tragedy. At a stroke it destroyed the delicate, battered but still viable working relationship that had seen the Beatles through six years of unimaginable pressure and success. In the studio there was a hierarchy, with Lennon at its peak. But each Beatle had an equal vote and could speak his mind. Now there was an unspeaking fifth body in the room, her face shadowed by her raven-black hair. Her silence and unwavering expression of mild boredom rang like a damning verdict in the other Beatles' ears. Her body language sang disapproval as her lips remained tightly closed.*3 They could endure scathing ridicule from each other, but this constant display of apathy was unbearable.
The most essential line of communication within the Beatles ran between Lennon and McCartney, and now that was interrupted, in both emotional and physical terms. McCartney felt judged, excluded, rejected. 'We could recognise [their love],' he admitted, 'but that didn't diminish the hurt we were feeling by being pushed aside.' His partnership with Lennon was non-sexual, but it ran deeper than anything he had experienced with a woman. It underpinned his self-belief and his status in the world. Seeing Lennon focus on Ono rather than him was as devastating as it would have been for Cynthia Lennon to witness the couple making love. Ono later dismissed the Beatles' attitude towards her as archetypally male: 'I didn't know about all this macho trip that they were on.'
McCartney's response was impulsive, alm
ost childish. Within a week he had seduced an American woman named Francie Schwartz, who was working in the Apple office, and brought her into the studio to balance Yoko Ono's presence. This power play soured the working relationship between the group. 'We were trying to take photographs for The Beatles Book when they were recording "Revolution",' recalled the magazine's publisher, Sean O'Mahony, 'and the atmosphere was terrible. It was the only time when we were really made to feel uncomfortable, particularly by George, who looked very unhappy and obviously didn't want us to be there.' O'Mahony was surprised to see Schwartz and Ono with the Beatles. 'Wives and girlfriends weren't usually allowed in the studio. My first thought when I saw Yoko was that she must be a girl from a Japanese pop magazine. I didn't imagine for a second that she could be with John.'
McCartney may have hoped to shock Lennon into recognising that women weren't welcome in the workplace, or simply show his colleague that he wasn't the only Beatle with a new girlfriend. But his show of petulance was also an admission that his relationship with Jane Asher was dying. In mid-June 1968 he flew to Colorado, where Asher was working, and spent his 26th birthday in her company. Two days later he was in Los Angeles on Apple business, where he was joined by Linda Eastman. Back in London he renewed his liaison with Schwartz, making no effort to conceal her when Asher returned home. The actress discovered Schwartz in the bedroom she'd been sharing with McCartney, stormed off and requested her mother to remove all her belongings from the house. Then she used a television interview to announce that their engagement was over, and never spoke in public again about Paul McCartney. If their paths crossed in future, they would be civil, but any sense of intimacy had been destroyed forever. 'Paul was absolutely devastated,' Apple aide Alistair Taylor recalled. 'Jane's departure shattered him. It was the only time I ever saw him totally distraught and lost for words. He went completely off the rails.'
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 6