Anytime a new Beatles or Beatles-related book appears, the first thing I do, assuming I'm in the book, is check out what the author wrote about me. It's a good litmus test for the book's overall truthfulness. A recent example is Elliot Mintz's memoir, We All Shine On. Mintz, a former celebrity journalist who fell into John Lennon and Yoko Ono's orbit, stayed true to form and produced an entertaining work of utter bullshit. (You can read my review here o puedes leerlo en español aquí.) But every writer has an agenda.
Yoko, by David Sheff, is the latest Beatles-related biography to come along. Unlike Mintz's book, there's nothing fundamentally false about me in Yoko. This hasn't always been the case with Sheff. He's credited as one of the writers responsible for "The Betrayal of John Lennon," a story that ran in Playboy more than 40 years ago. I don't entirely blame Sheff for the unauthorized use of excerpts from my diaries that appeared in the article—200 words cherry-picked from 500,000 I'd written in the heat of the moment, which he then grossly distorted to make it sound as if I were a greedy ghoul drooling over Lennon's corpse. And I don't think it's entirely his fault that he used only 22 words from a two-hour interview with me because they were the only 22 words that fit the predetermined Playboy storyline. I think Sheff was a tool of his editor, G. Barry Golson—he was only following orders. And Golson's orders were to portray Ono as a saintly widow exploited by the vicious people surrounding her. A chapter in my book Nowhere Man, "An Open Letter to G. Barry Golson," describes in detail what happened with the Playboy story.
With Yoko, I think Sheff is still following orders—from Ono herself, probably through her attorneys, and from the Lennon family. (A New York Times review describes the book as "predictably sympathetic, but not fawning.") But perhaps Sheff has gained a bit of wisdom in the past 40 years or possibly stumbled across a few journalistic ethics along the way. This time he treaded very carefully over what he said about me. He did not distort anything I've written about Ono and even included a link to this website in the endnotes. I think he understood that to lie about me as he did in the Playboy story would have invited my further scrutiny of the book, in search of additional Mintz-style falsehoods. Which saves me the trouble of having to read and review a 384-page Yoko Ono biography.
It's literary style that interests me, and as far as I can see, Sheff has none, beyond an ability to compose grammatically correct sentences.
______
All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.
I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram and Threads.