Author David Sheff.Simon and Schuster/Supplied
David Sheff occupies a rare perch as a journalist in the story of the multidisciplinary avant-garde artist Yoko Ono and her late husband John Lennon: He spent weeks interviewing the couple for Playboy shortly before Lennon’s death in 1980.
He and Ono also became friends, staying in touch for many years. Sheff visited her New York apartment in the days that followed Lennon’s death, witnessing her grief first-hand. His acclaimed 2007 book Beautiful Boy takes its name from a song on Lennon and Ono’s album Double Fantasy. The book dives into Sheff’s family’s experience with his son’s methamphetamine addiction, and in it, he describes friends who helped save his son’s life: Ono and her son, Sean Ono Lennon.
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Sheff reveals this and much more in Yoko, his authorized biography of the 92-year-old visual, performance, film and musical artist, published by Simon & Schuster on March 25.
He brings a reporter’s eye to Ono’s life, and despite their years of friendship, it’s not all complimentary. He writes that Ono was “ripe for exploitation,” for instance, by the psychics she surrounded herself with, harming her personal relationships. “I saw sides of Yoko that others speculated about,” he writes. The book goes far in its attempts to centre Ono in her own story, to crush spurious rumours and to situate her among her peers in the high echelons of postwar avant-garde art.
The Globe and Mail spoke with Sheff by phone.
Simon and Schuster/Supplied
You knew Yoko Ono for four decades before deciding to write this biography. Why write it now?
I’ve remained a fan of the music and of Yoko’s art. All the stories about hypnotizing John Lennon and breaking up the best band ever – I was stunned to find what I was hearing when I would talk to people about Yoko, even other people in the art world, or who knew a lot about music. And I saw a bumper sticker on a car driving by that said, “Still Pissed at Yoko.” She had never gotten her due. I did some research and saw there has not been this type of objective, definitive biography. I wanted to write the true story, not the sanitized version of it.
How did you work through the tension, then, between being her friend and bringing a clear narrative distance to the book?
I was walking this tightrope of wanting to tell the truth – that I didn’t want to write a sanitized, whitewashed version of this story – but at the same time, my bias was clear. The solution there was to be very upfront about it, to disclose it right at the beginning.
I didn’t find that I had to censor or edit myself. Part of it was because John’s whole thing was “gimme some truth,” and Yoko said the same thing: “I want the truth and nothing more.” I used that as a rallying cry. There were no stories that I thought I couldn’t tell.
You write that you haven’t been close for a while, and that she did not review your book before publication. What was your access like? Did she grant new interviews?
There were no new interviews. She’s retired, and I was not in touch with her. But over the years, I interviewed her a lot for various articles I wrote. For a while she was actually going to be writing an autobiography and asked me to do some interviews with her. So I talked to her a lot. She never slept, ever, and so the phone would ring at midnight in California, when it was three in the morning her time in New York, and we would talk for hours. So I’d had a lot of access to her, but no new access.
But when I proposed this to Sean and he signed on, it was significant. He opened doors to people in their family, including his sister Kyoko Ono, who had given very few interviews, and people close to her.
What parts of Yoko’s story did you want to clarify the most with your research?
The John-and-Yoko period, from the time they met till he died, was 14 of her 92 years, and that was covered so much. One of the big challenges was to tell that story in a way that hasn’t been repeated thousands of times. But maybe even more challenging was telling stories that haven’t been told at all – for example, of her relationship with her daughter, Kyoko. I think it was incredibly meaningful to see a side of Yoko that people never got to see because of her relationship with her daughter.
Yoko’s reliance and her obsession with psychics – I witnessed a lot of it. And that was especially heightened after John died, because she was so scared. She was so afraid and she had bodyguards 24 hours a day. I don’t think people had any knowledge of what that period was like for her. At one point, she said to me, “When John died, I thought it was the worst thing that would ever happen. But that was only the beginning.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
