Book Review: ‘Yoko: The Biography,’ by David Sheff

YOKO: The Biography, by David Sheff

Here’s the thing about Yoko Ono, the artist and widow of the murdered rock star John Lennon (usually not identified in that order), and the subject of David Sheff’s new biography. She is funny — ha-ha, not peculiar.

Asked by an interviewer if she’d ever forgive Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman, since Pope John Paul II had visited the jail of his own would-be assassin to offer absolution, Ono replied: “I’m not the pope.”

Promoting an ephemeral Museum of Modern Art “exhibit” in 1971, in part to protest the underrepresentation of women and Asian people there, she posed in front with a strategically placed shopping bag so that the building signage read “Museum of Modern (F) Art.” (This was years before “Family Guy”!)

Elton John recounted in his memoir, “Me,” how he’d wondered why Ono had sold the herd of Holstein cows she’d bought, trying to invest ethically. “All that mooing,” she told him.

For Ono, now 92 and mostly out of the public eye, to have written her own “Me” would have been profoundly out of character. Her art was crowdsourced long before that was a word. “Self-Portrait” was a mirror in a manila envelope that reflected the viewer. She invited audiences to step on a painting, play a form of the child’s game Telephone, climb into a bag, cut off her clothing or otherwise “finish” her visions.

Following Lennon’s death in 1980, trusted intimates flouted confidentiality agreements, stole the couple’s memorabilia and wrote tell-alls that Ono fought hard to suppress. (“Best book I’ll ever burn,” their son, Sean, told one particularly egregious betrayer in court.)