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| Photos by Susan Wood (edited versions of these appeared with the original article) |
Lennon and Ono Part 1
I Have Always Dreamed on This One Woman Coming into my Life
By Betty Rollin
Daily Express
March 12, 1969
Underneath Beatle John's comfy, unmade bed is a bare wood floor with a border of tacks. The tacks are there, John Lennon explains, because his ex-wife, Cynthia, and his mother-in-law removed the wall-to-wall carpeting. John thinks the tacks are funny and Yoko hasn't noticed them.
In any case, John Lennon hates his superbly ponderous Tudor house in Weybridge. He and Yoko plan to move to a contemporary glass job nearby.
John recalls how he bought the stockbroker Tudor Mansion. "I was besieged in me flat in London, so I just took the third house I saw. This was it," John said, in the old Liverpool lilt, running his beady four eyes over the mess around him.
The mess turned out to include what his wife left, what he kept, and what his mistress brought. His own stuff falls into two categories: equipment like tapes and hi-fis, and bits of whimsy. For instance, a clock on a pedestal with a stethoscope wrapped around it like a necktie.
Yoko brought, besides herself, a pile of macrobiotic food and an unwatered hospital orchard plant, which sits dying in the dark, Moorish, mirrored foyer.
"Welcome to Beverly Hills," calls Lennon waving us into the kitchen. It is one of those vast, obviously remodeled jobs with the sink in the center, and it is Beverly Hills, except, instead of the gilded spice rack, there is a portrait of Queen Victoria. And instead of a lush calendar, there is a sign that says, "The drunk and the glutton shall come to poverty". And instead of someone like Sandra Dee in the breakfast nook, there is Yoko Ono.
Yoko is short, not small. Short. Her face, what you can see of it in the middle of a bushy outburst of black hair, is almost fierce, and her chest is barrelled. So there they are, the Elvira Madigans of the pop world, their heads smelling of shampoo and both extolling the virtues and pleasures of the non-meat, pure food thing, which John says gives him a bigger high than drugs.
After a while, we all sit cross-legged on the floor, and they begin to talk about where they first met. "It was the Indica Gallery," says Yoko. "I was having a very important show there. It was damn successful. John came the night before the opening. He asked if he couldn't hammer in one of the nails of the Hammer In Nail Piece. It was symbolic. You see a virginal board for a man to hammer a nail in.
"I decided people had to pay 50s to hammer a nail in. And when the gallery owner told John he had to pay, he stopped for a moment and asked if he could just hammer in an imaginary nail. It was fantastic! That is what my art is about. It was my game. Suddenly, the two of us were playing the same game.
"I didn't know who he was, and when I found out, I just didn't care. I mean, in the art world, a Beatle is, well, you know.... Also he was in a suit, and he looked so ordinary."
John: "I was not! I was in a highly unshaven and tatty state. I had been up three nights. I was always up in those days, tripping. I was stoned. I wasn't in a suit. That was my psychedelic period. It's disgusting. Taking me for a clean-cut lad!"
Yoko: "Okay, I take it back."
John: "I don't remember her at the gallery at all. I was stoned. Then she called me up. She wanted scores of my songs for some book."
That's how they became friends. He said, "And from there it progressed. I used to bring her out to the house when my wife was here. We were just friends. I respected her work, and I knew she was having trouble with her husband. I tried to teach her how to meditate."
Yoko takes up the story. "I was getting very famous at that time. My career was going well, but my husband and I were fighting about who would answer the phone. He always wanted to answer the phone so that he could be into everything.
"I always thought of him as my assistant, you see, but he wanted it to be both of us. All I wanted was someone who would be interested in my work. I needed a producer," but now, apparently, it has changed. She agrees.
"The only thing about being in love", and she looks sideways at John with a fishy little smile, "is that it takes so much time, the work suffers. I am not working enough now. "
"What do you mean?" shouts John. "It's never been easier for you to work. If no one will produce what you do, I will! Whenever I'm not doing my Beatle work, I'll do her work completely. There's not much Beatle stuff now anyway, "
I asked him when he will stop all Beatle activity. "When I get fed up," he says.
Later, when Yoko left us, John flopped back on a yellow sofa and talked about his relationship with her. "We both think alike, and we both have been alone. We both had these dreams, the same kind of dreams. I always had this dream of this particular woman coming into my life. I knew it wouldn't be someone buying a Beatles record. His mind went back to his own marriage. He began to talk about it. "The way it was with Cyn was that she got pregnant, and so we got married. We never had much to say to each other, but the vibrations never upset me. Because she was quiet, you know, and I was away much of the time. "
He talked again then of his dream. "I would get fed up now and then, and I would start thinking, 'where is she?' I'd be hoping that the one would come. Then I'd get over it again. I mean, everyone's got that thinking of the one. The one what?"
He answered his own question. "Well, I suppose I was hoping for a woman who would give me what I get from a man intellectually. I went to someone I could be myself with. Of course, I'm a coward. I wasn't going to go off and leave Cyn and be by myself."
OF the state of affairs of his marriage, he said, "I was no good. Now, Cyn keeps saying in the papers that she didn't know anything was wrong. I just don't understand that."
And back the conversation goes to Yoko, "At the beginning, I was just enjoying her company. I mean, I didn't know what was really happening. Pretty soon after we knew one another, I had given up on the one woman thing. It was going to be the holy thing for me. I went to the Maharishi Yogi and stayed there.
"I kept telling her to meditate too, you know, but I still had no idea about us. Then, while I was in India, she began writing to me, 'I am a cloud. Watch for me in the sky.' I would get so excited about her letters. There was nothing in them that wives or mothers-in-law could have understood. And from India, I started thinking of her as a woman and not just an intellectual. And then when I got back, well, that's when it all began."
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