Yoko Ono – musician, artist, activist and the 92-year-old widow of the late John Lennon – took the brunt of the vitriol when The Beatles broke up in 1970, and details revealed in a new documentary film “One to One: John & Yoko” highlight her personal struggle.
Audio recordings from the early 1970s – the years that immediately followed the Beatles’ split – are featured in new documentary “One to One: John & Yoko,” out Friday, in which Ono discusses the harassment she faced. While her presence during Beatles recording sessions in the late 1960s famously caused tension, Ono always denied playing such a starring role in the end of the Fab Four.
“I’m supposedly the person who broke up the Beatles, you know? When I was pregnant, many people wrote to me saying, ‘I wish you and your baby would die,’” Ono says in the film.
She goes on to say that when she’d walk down the street with Lennon, “people came to me saying things like I’m ‘an ugly Jap.’ They pulled my hair and hit my head and I was just about to faint.”
Around that time, she added, she suffered three miscarriages.
“One to One” chronicles Lennon and Ono’s life in the early 1970s when they moved from England to New York City, living in a small Greenwich Village apartment as they became prominent political activists amid the start of Lennon’s solo career. The doc is a collage of recorded phone calls placed by Lennon and Ono, as well as remastered clips of the 1972 One to One benefit concert, which marked the first and only full-length concert that Lennon performed after the Beatles split and before his death in 1980.
Ono and Lennon’s son Sean Lennon served as an executive producer on the film and aided in the remastering of the concert footage.
At one point in the film, Lennon and Ono are seen attending the first International Feminist Conference at Cambridge University, where Ono made a speech about her experience going from an artist who had “relative freedom as a woman” to how things changed after being attached to Lennon.
When she met Lennon, she said, “society suddenly treated me as a woman who belonged to a man who was one of the most powerful people in our generation.”
“Because the whole society started to attack me and the whole society wished me dead, I started to stutter,” she said. “And suddenly, because I was associated to John, I was considered an ugly woman… That’s when I realized how hard it is for women. If I can start a stutter being a strong woman, it is a very hard road.”
In 2010, Ono told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview that even though the Beatles were on their way to parting ways before they did, people “didn’t think about that.”
“I think I was used as a scapegoat, and it’s a very easy scapegoat. A Japanese woman and whatever,” she said at the time, adding that she felt “sexism” and “racism” were also at play because “the United States and Britain were fighting with Japan in World War II.”
Ultimately, Ono persevered as best she could because her and Lennon’s love was so strong.
“It was sort of like a distant thing in a way, because John and I were so close. And we were just totally involved in each other and in our work,” she told Cooper. “That was much more exciting.”
“One to One: John & Yoko” is playing now in IMAX theaters.
