Yoko Ono and John Lennon had a very public love story. They met while Lennon was still married to his first wife, Cynthia, and eventually began an affair. Ono said that while she respected Cynthia, she could tell that the Lennons didn’t have a happy marriage. The way Lennon spoke about Cynthia in front of her felt inappropriate to her.
Yoko Ono said John Lennon didn’t speak kindly of his wife in front of her
Ono witnessed the dynamic between Cynthia and Lennon before their divorce. She said she could tell their marriage was in a rough place.
“I was looking at them as a couple, and I thought she was not very happy, and I even thought, well, you know, this is another male macho guy who’s treating her badly,” Ono said in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. “I felt bad because it was lunchtime and I’m seated next to him, and he was complaining [about his marriage] — not in a blunt way — he wasn’t one of those blunt macho working class husbands — but sort of subtly saying … That’s not the kind of thing you should be saying in front of another woman.”
She told herself that Lennon wouldn’t have spent time with her if his marriage was happy.
“Obviously, their marriage was not going gloriously; otherwise, he wouldn’t want to have me around,” she said. “The thing is, John and I fell in love.”
She shared her first impression of Cynthia Lennon
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The dynamic between Cynthia and Ono was, understandably, fraught. Still, Ono said she admired Cynthia when they first met. She could understand why Lennon fell for her.
“The first time I met her at Kenwood — I thought she was very quiet and sensitive — a nice lady,” Ono said. “She had a nice figure and my feeling was in Liverpool, when he went to art school, I think she was like a different class of chick, you know, rather elegant and graceful, and I think that’s probably what impressed John.”
Ono believed Cynthia was a strong woman. Cynthia would need to be to be able to put up with Lennon.
“She was a strong lady,” Ono said. “She had to be strong to be with John. He wasn’t a Goody Two-shoes. He was already complex and a boy with a chip on his shoulder.”
Cynthia Lennon walked in on John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their home
At the very end of the Lennons’ marriage, Lennon admitted to Cynthia that he’d cheated on her multiple times. Though he insisted he wanted to make it work, she returned home from a vacation to find him sitting in a bathrobe with Ono.
“I was in a daze,” she wrote in the book John. “My mind seemed to be floating and I couldn’t focus on anything other than the vivid image of them together. Every time I saw it I was overwhelmed by a fresh stab of pain, yet I couldn’t stop myself [from] conjuring it up as I tried to take in the betrayal.”
This was the final straw in their marriage. They divorced, and Lennon and Ono went on to marry.
