The break-up of history’s greatest pop band was inevitably blamed on Yoko, though the real cause was plainly visible, even at the time. Not content with intruding on The Beatles’ previously closed recording-sessions, she’d apparently even followed him into the gents’ toilet. She seemed to have taken control of John like a one-person cult, never letting him out of her sight. I made sure to include that in yet another send-up of her. There had been no Press reviews of the unveiled organ or, as Yoko innocently said, ‘the critics wouldn’t touch it’. I interviewed them the day after they’d premiered their new film, Self-Portrait, a lengthy close-up of a usually concealed part of John’s anatomy. For John, it was a trailblazing departure from normal rock star egotism and greed, yet mocked throughout the world’s media as preposterously naïve. The two were already intellectual as well as sexual partners, using John’s vast celebrity and Yoko’s artistic shock tactics to campaign for world peace. His once mocking, mischievous face had been solemnised by shoulder-length hair and a beard like an Old Testament prophet she was alternately spooning brown rice from a wooden bowl and caviar from a Fortnum & Mason jar. Yoko and John were sharing the same antique desk as if superglued together. Our first encounter was at The Beatles’ elegant headquarters in Savile Row, Mayfair, where their wealth was being frittered away on hordes of con-artists and freeloaders. I had no notion I would become her biographer and even, if only temporarily, her friend. Nor that she would survive the whole world’s hatred and unspeakable personal loss to celebrate her 90th birthday today.
No one then could possibly have foreseen her destiny as rock ’n’ roll’s most tragic widow. Pictured: John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971 'I knew no more than anyone else about this Japanese-American ‘performance artist’ who had caused John Lennon to leave his nice British wife and infant son and estranged him from his fellow Beatles'.
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