thia. Ono, who had been married twice before, was
mother to a daughter, Kyoko, who joined the couple
in Montreal for the 10-day “lie-in for peace” in May
- Time reported that the little girl “put on a show
of her own—hopping periodically from the bed, teddy
bear firmly in hand, grabbing handfuls of rose petals
and throwing them at newsmen and visitors.” “She
digs it all,” said John. But in 1971, when he and Ono
moved to New York City, Lennon would leave Julian
behind in England. The couple tried, unsuccessfully
for a while, to have a child together. By 1973 they had
split up, and Lennon took up with their assistant
May Pang for 18 months. He and Ono reunited in
early 1975. “It was a miserable period,” Lennon later
said of their time apart. That time marked another
notable reunion. During a 1974 Los Angeles session
for a Harry Nilsson album he was producing, Lennon
got back in the studio with McCartney. While he had
played with Ringo and George, about playing with
Paul, he had said, “we had a more difficult time, but
now we’re pretty close.” They didn’t cut any tracks (at
least not any that were released), but they did get on
well. “I jammed with Paul,” he revealed with a smile
in a TV interview. “There were 50 other people play-
ing, and they were all just watching me and Paul.”
He seemed open to the idea of a Beatles reunion—in
the studio, if not onstage—but then in 1975 something
happened that caused Lennon to put all music-
making on hold. He and Ono, then 42 and having
suffered several miscarriages, welcomed son Sean
on Lennon’s birthday that year. The ex-Beatle, who
by then had put out 10 solo albums, devoted himself
to the boy and virtually retired to dote on him and
bake bread at home. “Every night when I was going
to sleep, he’d come in and say, ‘Good night, Sean,’ and
he’d flick the light switch in the rhythm of his words,
so that they’d wink in time,” Sean Lennon told Philip
Norman, author of John Lennon: The Life in 2008.
“There was something very comforting about that.”
By the time Sean was kindergarten age, Lennon had
put himself back to work, and in the fall of 1980 he
and Ono released Double Fantasy, featuring alternat-
ing his-and-her tracks, and recorded in a mid-town
studio about 20 blocks from their apartment near
Central Park. When Sean protested his father’s go-
ing to work, Lennon explained in a September 1980
interview, he had told his young son, “It makes Daddy
happy to make music.”
The album was on the charts when Lennon be-
came the victim of a gunman’s fatal attack on Dec. 8,- Following her husband’s death at age 40, Ono
continued to live in their home with Sean. In the
early weeks, she later recalled, every shop seemed
to be playing the song Lennon had written for her,
“Woman.” In the years since, she would appear along-
side Lennon’s former bandmates when the Beatles
received honors and to make music. (She had her 10th
No. 1 dance single when she was 80.) And she contin-
ued to publicize an idea she and John first had back in
1969: War Is Over (If You Want It), though these days
she often gets the word out on Twitter.
THE BEATLES 1969 PEOPLE 43
ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
Yoko and Sean Ono Lennon attended the fifth anniversary
performance of Love, the Cirque de Soleil Beatles show
that features the band’s music inventively rerecorded by
George Martin’s son Giles, in Las Vegas in 2011.