And then?
“You just don’t think it could happen. Well you know it can happen but you just don’t imagine …”
After Lennon’s death, Yoko wanted to “clasp Sean close but I could not.” She was worried that she too would be assassinated. “Although I wanted to put my arms around my son and keep everything away, I couldn’t. I had to make sure he could survive without me.”
Such cool-headedness! Yoko isn’t cold by any means, but she’s learned to suppress her emotions and think long-term. When I ask about May Pang, Lennon’s mistress during his infamous “lost weekend,” she says she didn’t want the Ono-Lennon marriage to be “so suburban, you know? We were artists — why we were so conventional? We don’t have to be this way.” So Yoko pushed her husband into a fling with Pang, their assistant, a fling that nearly ended their marriage. Yoko doesn’t talk about this in detail, however, “because May Pang has her own story and I don’t want to deny that.”
That’s very gracious.
“It is not gracious,” says Yoko. She wants me to understand. “When I explained to you the situation with May Pang and with Sean, both times I made the decision in my head: OK, this is the correct path to follow. Then I have to see what happens, go on the journey, deal with the emotions that come out of that decision.”
What a complicated woman Yoko Ono is. Intellectual and emotional, avant-garde but deliberately simplistic, making hard-headed choices for heartfelt reasons. Talking to her makes me view her OnoChord and Wish Tree more indulgently. Perhaps if I was 75, having lived through all Yoko has lived through, I would want my work to be reduced to the simple desire that we be kind to each other.
I’ve often wondered about Yoko’s love life, post-Lennon. When I ask her, she tells me she has had relationships, but now she doesn’t feel the need. Partly because it’s difficult if you’re famous — “look at Paul and Heather” — and partly because of her beliefs about the irrelevance of distance and time.
“Sometimes,” she says, “John’s death is like a dream, like it never happened. And sometimes it is right here. Before it happened, I had a feeling about myself like I was the artist alone, working, but after John went, I had to look at myself and say: you have changed. Your life has changed, this is who you are now. You will always be seen as with him. And when I did that I felt differently.
“Now I feel like the whole big thing of John is like an umbrella around me, protecting me. I still have emotions and an emotional life. I have decided to love all the people who miss John. A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is a reality.”
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