Yoko, the daughter of a successful concert pianist, studied musical composition at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, New York. Together they begin to improvise the sounds and vocals that in November of 1968 appear on their album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins.

They make love at sunrise. In the morning, Shotton finds John in the kitchen.

“We’ve been up all night,” John tells him.

That much is obvious. What John says next is the real stunner. “I want to go and live with Yoko.”

*  *  *

Cynthia opens the door to the sunroom. It’s May 22, and she’s returned one day early from Greece. She finds her husband and a Japanese woman dressed in robes and sitting cross-legged on the floor, facing each other.

Cynthia freezes. She recognizes the woman—the artist Yoko Ono. They’d met once before at a meditation meeting.

Cyn stares, blinking rapidly, as if trying to wash the sight from her eyes.

No. No, this can’t be happening.

“Oh, hi,” John says.

Yoko looks in the opposite direction as Cyn stumbles out of the sunroom and leaves the house.

After a tenuous reconciliation that lasts only a few weeks, John sends Cyn on holiday again, this time to Italy.

Yoko moves into John’s house. She’s left her second husband, Tony Cox, and their young daughter, Kyoko.

John has never felt more alive—or happier. Yoko has transformed him.

They become inseparable.

Chapter 35

Chapter 35

And while Lennon read a book on Marx…

—“American Pie”

I want to put out what I feel about revolution,” John tells Yoko.

That word, revolution, has been swirling in his head ever since his sojourn in India. John and Yoko follow the news. Every headline shouts of fresh violence. John F. Kennedy. Assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr. Assassinated. Twenty thousand of the nearly half million US troops in Vietnam. Killed in action.

John risks hostile fire on multiple fronts when on May 31, 1968, the Beatles begin recording a new album.

Yoko, seven years John’s senior, has made it clear that her happiness is linked to his.

“I demand equal time, equal space, equal rights,” she tells John.

“What do you want, a contract?” he asks.

“Well,” she says, “the answer to that is that I can’t be here.”

Her absence is a situation John can’t accept, so he breaks the band’s long-held pact forbidding wives and girlfriends from recording sessions.

“She just moved in,” George says, voicing what the rest of the group, along with George Martin and the studio engineers, is feeling.

Paul is more understanding. “It’s not that bad,” he says. “Let the young lovers be together.” But knowing how tense things are in the band, he’s prescient in joking, “It’s gonna be such an incredible sort of comical thing, like in fifty years’ time, you know. ‘They broke up because Yoko sat on an amp!’”