Give me a chance, says Yoko

Before meeting her, my image of Yoko Ono, beyond the practised inscrutability, is of a woman trapped -- by John Lennon's death and public hostility -- in the apartment she never gave up in the Dakota building in New York, outside which Lennon was shot and killed in 1980.Cushioned by an enormous fortune, she is still, as she was when she met Lennon in the 1960s, an artist making baffling, beautiful art and music.

Fundamentally though, Ono's public image has frozen as "the widow". Recently, in a speech to mark International Widows' Day, she said that she and her son Sean were "still suffering" over Lennon's death. Ono said society "must give widows a chance", which is ironic. As Germaine Greer noted recently, Ono "is still hated and reviled ... Her enormous wealth can be no consolation for the kneejerk assumption she encounters a hundred times a day that she destroyed Lennon's gift and broke up the best band there ever was."

That clotted history is never far away. In a step to build long-damaged bridges, Ono invited Cynthia Lennon, John's first wife, and their son Julian to the premiere in Las Vegas of Cirque du Soleil's Beatles tribute, Love. Despite her long-running battles with Paul McCartney over songwriting credits, Ono is angry at how the media has treated his estranged wife, Heather Mills.

"I think the attacks should stop with me. I have an ideal reason for you guys to dislike me, for being an Asian and a foreigner and for standing up for myself and for my work," Ono says. "Whatever it is that made it easier for you to make me a scapegoat is still there, so leave them alone. I feel so badly for them." She denies writing to Mills, bad-mouthing Paul. "It's totally untrue. I send them Christmas cards and a congratulatory note when their baby was born."

The weird air of confinement around Ono, 73, is exacerbated by the grand, stuffy London hotel suite where we meet. She is birdlike-tiny, dressed in a black jumpsuit, accessorised with blue-tinted shades. "I hate this," she says nervily, meaning being interviewed. An hour later, as I leave, she says: "Quote me carefully." This isn't a caution but a weary plea of someone who feels consistently misunderstood.

Ono has an exhibition in London of three of her art works, in St Paul's Cathedral. Morning Beams uses rope to create the illusion of beams of light shining on to River Bed, a "river of life". Outside the cathedral stands her Wish Tree. She wants to create "an environment of meditative reflection".

The pieces are astonishingly beautiful and accomplished. Morning Beams is a game with words, Ono explains. "Just like beam can be a wooden beam, the stuff in our lives we're limited by, so it's also light, a morning beam." The installation sums up Ono's life: burdens of the past sitting alongside genuinely held New Agey beliefs in better tomorrows. She likes wordplay. "The whole universe was made by words. In the beginning there was a word, not God but love." And her dourness is broken by an impish smile.

Making art has always been her "security blanket". She was born in Tokyo and didn't see her father, a banker who worked around the world, until she was two and a half. (He was a trained pianist but his father had stipulated his son's profession in his will.) Ono's mother was a painter. "Just as most women artists, she gave up when she got married. They were very repressed, very conscious of their responsibilities and the dignity of the family."

At four she went to a special pre-school where she learned to compose songs and started writing poems. Was she happy? "Aside from the fact of being careful of not hurting the family name, of trying to be proper, I was fine," she smiles grimly. "My strongest memory is of being alone."

She remembers the sound of bombs in Tokyo at the beginning of World War II, exploding near the air-raid shelters. She and her mother were evacuated to the countryside. "I remember returning to Tokyo and seeing what was once a beautiful city turned into a bombsite." Her father was in French Indochina (later Vietnam), and unbeknown to her and her mother, in a concentration camp. "He never referred to it when we saw him again."

From a young age, Ono says, she felt she "had something to say to people". She agonises for a moment. "When I was four or five I had a friend. I would think of an idea. 'This is something we have to tell the world,' I'd say, so we'd write it down." What did she have to tell the world? "That there are many spiritual things that people are not aware of. When John and I got together we'd get into a certain philosophy, then we'd find its weakness and kill it, like a warrior, move on. If you don't, you get stuck."

Ono attended Sarah Lawrence, an arts college in New York, and began mixing in avant-garde circles. The musician John Cage was an early friend. Alongside Cage and Claes Oldenburg she was in at the beginning of the Fluxus group of artists. George Maciunas defined it as "a fusion of Spike Jones, gags, games, vaudeville, Cage and Duchamp". One of Ono's early performance art pieces, Cut Piece, involved the audience cutting off her clothing until she was naked.

In 1966, when she met Lennon, Ono was in a failing marriage to her second husband, Anthony Cox, who, after their divorce in 1971, abducted their daughter Kyoko. (Ono and her daughter were finally reunited in 1998.) She and Lennon were introduced at the Indica Gallery in London, though initially she had no idea who he was. She was exhibiting a work that invited the spectator to hammer a nail into a painting. "I only made money by lecturing so I said for five shillings this guy could hammer an imaginary nail into it. Next he grabbed an apple off a pedestal -- another artwork -- and ate it which made me angry." After he'd gone, someone told Ono who the funny man was.

"John is a very difficult guy (note the 'is', rather than 'was') and I am a difficult person and it's a miracle we met," Ono says. "At one point I realised I was in love and I thought: 'Oh, this is inconvenient.' I didn't care what people thought about me but I didn't want to be involved in what was clearly going to be a complex situation. I would lose my independence, that was clear. Both of us were very much alike in the sense that we didn't give a damn but we both cared a lot. We might have seemed like such free people -- that we were saying hi, bye to our families -- but we weren't like that."

Lennon and Ono became poster stars -- and donors -- for every conceivable left-wing cause. "Everyone wanted to try and manipulate us. But we were using the media, too. We went along with it because it could do some good, whether it was macrobiotic food or world peace." Their famous bed-in in 1969 was "just theatre".

They split up for a year in 1973, Lennon taking up with their secretary, May Pang. "The whole mechanism was too much. The fact that John is, was, was, is, a popular figure meant they (the media and public) couldn't stand that he was with me. I got the brunt of it. We were doomed."

In 1980 Lennon was murdered. "When John passed away so suddenly that night, I felt as though half of me flew away with him," she wrote last year.

How did the subsequent vilification feel? "If I had a husband who was abusive toward me that would have been worse than the whole world attacking me," Ono says. "And I had a great husband who loved me. What's important is that I cherish life. The thing that makes my heart warm is the sky. Even now they make up stories and sometimes it is hurtful." She raises her voice. "And I should learn how not to get hurt. But I'm a human being. At the same time I have lots of ideas and since I reached 70 I see every day as precious."

What about the forthcoming movie Chapter 27, starring Lindsay Lohan, about Mark Chapman who shot and killed Lennon? Ono lets out a shuddering "aaah".

"This is another thing which will hurt me, I'm sure. I would rather not make a story out of Mr Chapman at all, although I sympathise with the actors. They need to work. It's not just films, you're (the media) always talking about it." She looks down. "Every day, every week, is an anniversary for me. There is not one time that John is not around me, or my memory of John is not there. It has been 25 years, but it has passed so fast."

Ono's fortune has been estimated at $US775 million ($1 billion) and she presides over all Lennon-related business (cannily and, some critics have claimed, cynically with an eye on making money out of her husband). On the 25th anniversary of his death, she joined fans in Strawberry Fields, Central Park, in an act of remembrance. Isn't she trapped in the widow role? "No, I'm a free soul," she says peppily.

But why stay in the Dakota? "I am not trapped there. That's not true," she says, darkening. "When Western Europeans say, 'But how can you stand living in a place where that happened?', it's a kind of racism. You stay in the place you made a home. The fact that one member of the family has died should not make you want to move out. That's the only home John and I had. It's the place where John was, where we were together, the place where Sean was from the beginning of his life. It's important to him. I'm not going to throw it away."

Has Ono fallen in love since Lennon? She broke up with the antiques dealer Sam Havadtoy in 2001. She looks thrown. "Um ... I was going to say I hope I don't but it's probably all right that I fall in love. You will know, OK? I'm not going to hide it. I think I have been with John all this time, working on his stuff. It's a very difficult situation for anyone to put up with." And the future? "I have no idea what the future is for me," Ono says stonily. "I never do."

She must have ambition left? Ono smiles. "I want to be healthy and live until I decide that I don't want to." Gosh. Is she talking about euthanasia? "I'm not saying I'm going to commit suicide," Ono says with weary defensivness, terrified at being misunderstood again. "But it would be nice if I could live until I get sick and tired of living." Then she adds very firmly and very pointedly: "I'm not."

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