Cynthia Lennon Said Yoko Ono’s ‘Insensitivity’ After John Lennon’s Death Took Her ‘Breath Away’

Immediately after John Lennon’s death, Cynthia Lennon reluctantly let her son, Julian, visit Yoko Ono in New York. Julian was still a teenager, and Cynthia didn’t want him to travel alone. Still, she allowed him to do what he felt was necessary. While Julian enjoyed spending time with his younger brother, Sean, Cynthia felt that Ono treated him callously. 

Cynthia Lennon said Yoko Ono overlooked Julian Lennon after John Lennon died

When Julian arrived at the Dakota, Lennon and Ono’s building in New York, he found the apartment empty. Fred Seamen, Lennon’s personal assistant, took this opportunity to warn Julian about the visit. 

“‘[Ono] will do anything to keep you in your place,’ he said. ‘Sean is the only person who matters to her. There’s simply no place for you in her world,’” Cynthia wrote in her book John. “Fred’s message was pretty brutal but it was proven absolutely true over the next weeks and months.”

Still, Ono was vulnerable with Julian when she saw him, admitting she didn’t know how to tell Sean about Lennon’s death. The older boy agreed to help.

Julian Lennon was not a part of the statement about Lennon’s death

Julian offered his advice to Ono on how to talk to Sean. In the end, though, they both sat down with him.

“‘In the end we both talked to him,’ Julian told me. ‘We told him Daddy was dead and when he finally understood, he burst into tears and I cuddled him. I told him the man who killed our dad would go to court. Sean said, ‘Do you mean a tennis court or a basketball court?’ I said, ‘No it’s a different kind of court.’”

Later, Ono issued a statement about Lennon’s death in which she erased Julian’s presence in the conversation and, according to Julian, took credit for some of his words. Cynthia was horrified when she found out. 

“This statement, published in newspapers around the world, summed up so much of what Julian had to go through,” Cynthia wrote. “There was no mention of his being there with Yoko when she told Sean. Yoko even quoted Julian’s words as her own. There was no mention that John’s older son had also lost a father. And Julian’s name was not added to the signature. The insensitivity of this took my breath away.”

Cynthia believed this was especially unfair because Lennon would have been proud of Julian’s strength.

“I knew John would have been just as proud of Juilan as of Sean,” she wrote. “Julian showed immense courage and composure throughout the terrible days after his father’s death, and on top of this he had to endure being excluded from Yoko’s public responses to John’s death.”

Yoko Ono said she respected Cynthia Lennon

Unsurprisingly Cynthia and Ono did not always see eye to eye. Still, when they first met — before Cynthia knew about the relationship between Ono and Lennon — Ono said she respected the other woman.

“The first time I met her at Kenwood — I thought she was very quiet and sensitive — a nice lady,” Ono said in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. “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 that Cynthia was strong. She’d have to be to be married to Lennon.

“She was a strong lady,” Ono said, adding “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.”