Also, people who have posted claiming Ono was a respected avant-garde artist before she met Lennon – no, she was not.
Andy Warhol had a very low opinion of her, he knew her in the mid sixties and said she was ‘always hanging around, stealing other people’s ideas’
Her first husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi, was a very gifted avant-garde musician , he studied at Columbia under Aaron Copeland and Vincent Persichetti, who taught Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Hilda Wolpe, wife of the composer Stefan Wolpe, knew Ono at this time (late 1950’s). He said Ono was clingy and manipulative. Ichiyanagi told the Japanese media ‘she was never happy unless she was treated like a queen. She was selfish and morbid.’ He also said his ex wife was only an artist in the sense that she fucked whoever she pleased, regardless of her marriage.
She had many abortions as a result, as she told Esquire in 1970 ‘oh! In New York (in the 50’s)was always having abortions …my (first)husband was very kind’.
She only stayed with Toshi as he knew La Monte Young, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, the cutting edge classical musicians of that time.
She left Toshi to set herself up as an ‘artist’, without any training. She moved in with writer Michael Rumaker, who was gay, and who wrote this about her ’ she had a face of incredible cunning and stealth, of violence and murder’.
She attached herself to La Monte Young. His partner, the poet Diane Wakoski, said ‘I thought of her as a hustler, not an artist. She earned her living as a model, and seemed to go to bed with all the men around’
Ono’s roommate Erica Abeel said she was a’phony, her art was a lot of bullshit. In our apartment it was wall to wall fucking, I’d come home and she’d be fucking La Monte Young, in my bed’.
Ono’s last lover of this period was the painter Shusaku Arakawa. He introduced her to the artist Yayoi Kusama, whose work Ono stole many times and passed off as her own. Kusama described Ono as a ‘soulless copycat’.
Arakawa recalled that Ono was ‘very hard. (I always thought) she could kill’.
Anonymous
It’s scary how similar Sophie Hunter’s personality profile is to that of Yoko Ono. Maybe SH used YO as an inspiration for how to trap and destroy a talented man by plying him with heroin…among other things. Also observe how the men in their lives acted under their influence, the parallels are very worrying. YO gained a lot when JL got bumped off, just saying…