Yoko Ono Admitted Cynthia Lennon Had to Be ‘Strong’ to Deal With John Lennon

Yoko Ono said she had a great deal of respect for Cynthia Lennon. She shared why she thought Cynthia was a strong person.

Yoko Ono and John Lennon began a relationship while he was still married to his first wife, Cynthia Lennon. The affair, of course, did nothing good for the relationship between the two women. When Ono first met Cynthia, though, she said she liked her a great deal. She recognized an innate strength in her that had to be present in order to put up with Lennon.

Yoko Ono shared what she thought of Cynthia Lennon when she first met her

Cynthia met Ono before she realized she was having an affair with her husband. Ono said Cynthia’s poise impressed her.

“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 Cynthia’s intelligence had helped her win Lennon over. She also believed that Cynthia’s strength helped her stay in the relationship.

“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.”

Yoko Ono could tell John and Cynthia Lennon’s marriage was in a bad place

Before Cynthia discovered the affair, Ono said Lennon often complained to her about his wife. While this made her uncomfortable — she knew he shouldn’t be talking about his wife that way to her — she developed deep feelings for him.

“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. But he was a man of the world by then. He wasn’t a virgin. I think he’s one of those people who took marriage very seriously and I do too … So to leave that and get together, there had to be a very strong reason for it. But as John said, it was bigger than both of us.”

She said she didn’t want to get involved with a married man

Ono faced criticism over the years for pursuing Lennon, but she said this was not what happened. She claimed she hadn’t wanted to get involved with a married man.

“I didn’t want to have any difficulty with a married man,” she said, adding, “I was very much interested in my work. I had my child and my husband. Getting help [from John] on a work level was all right. I probably had this feeling that I just wanted to keep it that way, not getting sticky about it.”

Still, the couple did not remain platonic for long. They married in 1969.