Yoko Ono and Cynthia Lennon Have Very Different Memories of How Cynthia Discovered John Lennon’s Affair

Yoko Ono and John Lennon's affair came to light when Cynthia Lennon found them in the house. The two women had different memories of the day.

After years together, Cynthia Lennon realized her husband, John Lennon, was having an affair with Yoko Ono. In her retelling, Cynthia remembered coming home from vacation to find Lennon and Ono sitting in the kitchen wearing bathrobes. Cynthia recalled the shock and pain of realizing her marriage was over. Ono said that while she didn’t want to discount Cynthia’s recollection, she remembered things happening differently.

Cynthia Lennon recalled walking into her kitchen and finding John Lennon and Yoko Ono

In 1968, Cynthia and Lennon were on a flight when the latter confessed that he had cheated on her multiple times. While she knew women liked him, she hadn’t anticipated the extent of her husband’s betrayal. Still, he insisted that he wanted to make their marriage work, and she agreed.

Not long after this, though, Cynthia returned from a trip to Greece with friends to find Lennon and Ono sitting together in the kitchen. She was so stunned by the scene that she invited them to dinner.

“We were all looking forward to dinner in London after lunch in Rome and breakfast in Greece,” she asked, per her book John. “Would you like to come?”

Cynthia said she immediately came to regret this reaction. She was too stunned by what appeared to be calculated cruelty on Lennon’s part to respond in any other way, though.

“The stupidity of that question has haunted me ever since,” she wrote. “Confronted by my husband and his lover — wearing my dressing gown — behaving as though I was an intruder, all I could do was carry on as if everything were normal. In fact, I was in shock, operating on auto-pilot. I had no idea how to react. It was clear that they had arranged for me to find them like that and the cruelty of John’s betrayal was hard to absorb.”

Yoko Ono said it happened differently

Ono claimed Cynthia was not as shocked as she said. According to Ono, while Cynthia may not have expected to find them in the kitchen, she had known about the affair.

“Well, it wasn’t really like that,” she said in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. “Cynthia was in Greece — and she didn’t come back on the expected date. We checked and found out that everybody was telling her about [John and me].”

Ono believed Cynthia’s pain was born more of embarrassment than shock.

“She felt embarrassed to come back,” she said. “She didn’t just suddenly come into the kitchen and found us like ‘What’s this?’ you know.”

Yoko Ono said she didn’t want to counter Cynthia Lennon’s recollections of that day

While Ono’s memory contradicted Cynthia’s, she said she didn’t want to discount what Lennon’s first wife experienced.

“Also I don’t question anything she remembers, anything she wrote in her book, because the way [John and I] got together must have hurt her a lot,” she said. “I would have hurt anybody — so anything she says, I’m not going to argue with. And I never have.”