Yoko Ono by Donald Brackett

Author:Donald Brackett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sutherland House Books
Published: 2022-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

The Expanding Field

GROWING UP, YOKO ONO had often felt like a stranger in her own family. As the music journalist Jerry Hopkins wrote, she had “a father who was married to his job and a mother divorced from mothering.” Yoko would often speak of the hurt she had felt at home yet she was often absent for long periods of time from her own daughter’s life. Her daughter, Kyoko, lived with Anthony Cox through most of her childhood, although her parents technically shared custody. Even when they were together, Yoko tended to look at Kyoko as an object of artistic potential rather than as a child, sharing with Playboy: “When she was not even a year old, I took her onstage as an instrument, an uncontrollable instrument, you know. My communication with her was on the level of sharing conversation and doing things. She was closer to my ex-husband because of that.”

On the whole, the arrangement seemed to work well for all concerned, until it didn’t. Yoko unquestionably loved her daughter. Cox and Kyoko were even routine visitors at Tittenhurst. Lennon, however, still considered Cox something of a grifter. The mistrust was strong enough that he forbade Yoko from attending a birthday party for the seven-year-old Kyoko because he didn’t want to deal with Cox. “Can you imagine how I felt,” reflected Yoko. “I heard that Kyoko had been watching the door all afternoon, waiting for me to arrive.”

Lennon’s misgivings about Cox weren’t misplaced. He did seem to view his ex-wife, Yoko, as something of a meal ticket, and he had a history of involvement in shady organizations, including a cult in Denmark through which he relived past lives and communicated with extraterrestrial life. More recently he’d become close to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whom Lennon, after an initial infatuation, dismissed as a fraud. Cox also had his own misgivings about Lennon and the life he led with Yoko. He was around them often enough to at least have suspicions about their drug habits, and he was apoplectic about Lennon’s car accident that left his daughter with cuts to her face. He began withholding access to Kyoko and in April 1971 the two of them abandoned their London flat and simply disappeared.

Yoko learned through Cox’s friends that he had decamped to Majorca, where the Maharishi kept a house. She and John flew to Spain, checked into a hotel under assumed names, pulled Kyoko out of a kindergarten class, and tried to leave the country with her. Cox, who had been in a meditation session while all this was happening, received a call from the school and in turn alerted the police, who dramatically arranged checkpoints at all exits from Majorca.

Officers found Yoko, John, and Kyoko at their hotel and led them to a police station to make a statement. A photo of Lennon carrying a barefoot Kyoko to the station made newspapers around the world. All parties next appeared before a Spanish judge who asked the girl which parent she wanted to live with.

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