Yoko Is Beautiful (Says John) - (1971)

 Yoko is Beautiful (Says John)

By Chris Pritchard

The Sydney Morning Herald

July 24, 1971

    John Lennon and Yoko Ono are in London this week to launch the paperback edition of Grapefruit, Yoko's book. They granted their first long interviews for nearly a year. Here is the report of a one-hour private conversation. 

    Yoko Ono is beautiful, well, not really, but John Lennon more or less made me promise to say she is, and, in a funny sort of way, she is rather attractive. "It's peculiar, you know, the way people say she's ugly," John reflected this week. "I mean, the papers say the most hideous women are attractive, but with Yoko, they say she's ugly. They've never done that about anybody else." Through all this, Yoko smiled a big, toothy smile at me, and said she agreed. 

    "We're still a very loving couple, the two of us," she interrupted. "I used to dread the future and think that all the passion was a passing thing. I would think forward and predict to myself that marriage to one person would become a bore after three years, but it hasn't. We're closer and busier than ever."

     The ex-Beatle and his wife were relaxing at Apple, the Savile Row headquarters of the Beatles' organization. Despite the group's demise, the four individuals are still hot properties. Down the road are London's most conservative men's tailors, but outside the white-painted Apple building, more than 100 groupies, half of them young summer trippers from other countries, wait expectantly for a glimpse of even one of the four. 

    Inside, the luckier groupies, those on the Apple payroll, are opening fan mail or making coffee for the stripe-suited city gents, who, following the much-publicized Beatles court battle, keep Apple's finances on the straight and narrow. John and Yoko receive their guests in a big front room. They sit at a white-and-purple desk, with Yoko eating boiled sweets from a brown paper bag and John scurrying about like a messenger on a never-ending search for "this press handout we've got somewhere that gives a bit of background on your last question."

     He's beginning to get a bit of an establishment manner. 30-year-old John is. He talks about his seven-year-old son by his former marriage as "the lad, my boy Julian", who is in the habit of coming down for the weekends. 

    John's face is clean-shaven, his hair shortish, and his wife is very much the adoring companion, slightly in the background, despite the fact that it is the launching of her paperback, Grapefruit, that the two of them are promoting. The book was published in hardback last year (although limited extracts were circulated a decade ago). But at the time, the twosome were undergoing therapy at a hideout in the United States. So, according to John, "The only publicity the book received was a statement by the publisher that he was annoyed we were not around to promote it." Grapefruit is a collection of Yoko Ono's thoughts and observations. "A code for living," she calls it.

 Sample:  "Have a dance party. Let people dance with chairs."  And again, "Draw a line with yourself. Go on drawing until you disappear."

     Yoko says reactions to her work are good in the United States, but shocking in Britain. "They don't understand it in England. They say it's rubbish, but in the United States, we are treated as serious artists."

     John interposed, "I think the trouble, Yoko, is this: in my own country, I'm regarded as the lad who won the pools and went off to marry his Japanese princess. You're the Japanese princess, not to be taken too seriously."

     Despite their preference for the United States as a working base, they prefer living in England, where they have an impressive house at Ascot. "It's a wonderful place to return to, the gardens and the lake," John told me. "I like my house."

     They both believe their lives are more hectic now than they were while the Beatles, as an entity, were still alive. "Yoko has the American paperback edition of her book coming out in a few months," John said, "As well as an off-Broadway show; she's got an exhibition of her art lined up for the Guggenheim Museum in New York early next year, and right now we're finishing the mixing of her record Fly, which should be released soon. 

    "I've got the possibility of an off-Broadway show too. Then there's my album Imagine, that we're busy on. It's almost finished. We've never been busier, or I feel, as popular. Our stuff still sells, and that proves people like us."

     Discussion of the other ex-Beatles is minimal. In fact, it's confined to a few dropped remarks about arch enemy Paul McCartney, who John believes tried to make the group his personal vehicle. "The trouble in Britain," John told me, "is that some people treat us as more friends of Paul's rather than as artists in our own right."

     But one of John's chief interests now is politics. "I suppose you could call me rather left-wing." He admitted.

     That he was seriously interested in self-stylized revolutionary politics first became apparent about five months ago when he allowed himself to be interviewed by Red Mole, a British Trotskyist journal with a tiny circulation. Red Mole is run by Tariq Ali, one-time Trafalgar Square firebrand, and Robin Blackburn, a long-haired economist who lost his lecturing job following rowdy demonstrations in the London School for Economics in 1969. The pair interviewed Lennon and his wife for an issue which sold many times the usual print order.

     Everyone wanted to see what John Lennon was saying. He was declaring himself to be a working-class lad, praising Mao and people's war and offering strong verbal support to the ultra left; had he done any harm to his reputation? "No, I don't think so," he told me. "People who don't like it, I'm better off without. It's not as if I'm a communist or anything. The leftists hadn't really asked for my views before, so when they did, I just told them how I felt. That's all. I believe it is in the Australians to keep the British underground spirit alive. Richard Neville and Jermaine Greer are Aussies, right?" he asks, turning to Yoko, who nods.

     John and Yoko have just finished composing "God Save Oz", a song which hit the record shops this week, performed by an impromptu Oz Elastic Band (not featuring John and Yoko). Proceeds from the record will go toward paying the lawyers in the Oz magazine obscenity trial, now on at the Old Bailey.

     I mentioned that last year he had been scheduled to visit Australia several times, and each time the plans were shelved. "Yeah, I know, but when we were in the Beatles, we got our best reception in Australia. I've always wanted to go back there and take Yoko along." Yoko was standing at the window and looking down at the street, where by now about 300 groupies were gathered. "You'd think it was some kind of occasion." She observed, dipping her hand back into the bag of sweets.