Nicky Samuel meets Yoko Ono, July 1967
After a while we were joined by the woman, who was small and Japanese, with a serious face and long black hair which stretched down beyond her waist. Eying me shrewdly, she told me that she was Yoko Ono, and she expected that I had heard of her?
‘Yes of course!’ As an artist, Yoko was already a cult figure, well-known in the newspapers for her habit of putting people into paper bags. I remembered Susie writing to tell me how she and Nigel and Yoko had gone to the Dorchester with some other friends. First the men had nearly been refused entry for not wearing ties; and then they had all got into the lift, where they had climbed into a paper bag. So on the spur of the moment I asked Yoko: ‘Have you got any large paper bags with you?’
She smiled. ‘No, but they’re screening my new film in the cinema just through there: come and see – oh, but first you must say hello to my husband, Tony Cox!’
There was something in Tony’s expression which made me take an instant dislike to the man; but I agreed to go and watch some of Yoko’s film with her. Soon I wished I hadn’t. The film was called Bottoms. It hadn’t yet had its official premiere, and it was as boring as its title suggests: just one bottom after another, so meaningless that after a while I felt as though I was looking at cuts of meat. I was relieved when Tony came in, and said that Nigel was going to drive us round to the flat he shared with Yoko.
Soon after we arrived, we were joined by Allen Ginsberg, with his distinctive long dark hair, straggly beard and large glasses. I hadn’t been to the poetry reading at the Albert Hall where he had stirred up the audience by taking all his clothes off; but I had read HOWL, his fashionable book of beat poems, and I could hardly believe my luck when a few minutes later I found myself sitting next to him at Yoko’s kitchen table. Even the dreary brown rice which she offered us with a few nondescript vegetables seemed magically transformed by the surrounding company. Here I was, the day after leaving school, sitting down to table with some of the high priests of the alternative culture, most of whom were smoking joints. ‘You’ve done it!’ I said to myself. ‘You’ve made it into the real world!’
Nobody seemed to speak very much. In fact there were long silences; and it seemed surprising when one of these was broken by Yoko leaning across the table towards me, and saying rather diffidently: ‘I hear you’re looking for a holiday job?’ I nodded eagerly. ‘Then would you like to come and look after Kyoko,’ – here she gestured to her four-year-old daughter, who was busy pouring salt onto the floor – ‘and maybe help me with my art?’