Three years ago, when the National Music Publishers’ Association presented Yoko Ono with their Centennial Song Award, Sean Lennon pushed his mother onto the stage at Cipriani 42nd Street in a wheelchair — shocking some who didn’t realize the avant-garde artist was incapacitated.
But in her signature shades, black leather jacket and white Panama hat, the widow of John Lennon didn’t seem to miss a beat when she began a short acceptance speech by addressing the elephant in the room.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, clutching the award in one hand and a microphone in the other as Sean whispered to her about what was going on. “I’ve learned so much from having this illness. I’m thankful I went through that.”
While it’s not clear what “illness” she was referring to, Ono, now 87, is still ailing, requires round-the-clock care and rarely leaves her sprawling apartment in The Dakota, a source close to her staff told The Post. In photos taken at rare public appearances — including a women’s march in Columbus Circle last year and at a commemoration of John in Liverpool in May 2018 — Ono is confined to a wheelchair, or walks with great difficulty using a cane, often leaning on a caregiver or Sean for support.
She has also been selling off some real-estate assets in recent years. “She has definitely slowed down, like anyone at that age,” said Elliot Mintz, a close family friend who has known Ono for nearly 50 years, and has acted as a family spokesman, representing the John Lennon estate since the former Beatle’s murder in December 1980. “But she is as sharp as she once was.”
Mintz told The Post he last saw Ono at her 87th birthday party in February. He was one of more than 30 guests, including Rolling Stone magazine co-founder Jann Wenner, singer Cyndi Lauper and Ono’s daughter, Kyoko, 56, from her pre-John marriage to film producer Anthony Cox.
Two years after their divorce in 1971, Cox fled with Kyoko and raised her in Christian fundamentalist communes. Ono fought for years for Kyoko, who began reaching out to her mother after John’s murder. According to Mintz, Ono is now very close to Kyoko as well as Sean, her 44-year-old son with Lennon.
“Sean is her best friend,” said Mintz. “They have dinner two or three times a week, and he occasionally brings his mom out as a guest star in his band.”
Sean organizes Ono’s birthday party every year, painstakingly obsessing over the decorations and flower arrangements, Mintz said. In February, he took over Bar Wayo at the South Street Seaport for the party, where guests celebrated over champagne. In previous years, Sean and Ono have taken to the stage to perform.
But this year, the celebration was more low-key. “She blew out the candles with Sean and she was among the last to leave,” Mintz told The Post. “She was in good spirits. I helped her into her wheelchair and gently helped her into her car.”
Mintz would not comment on Ono’s personal medical history. “She is a particularly special being,” he said. “In these 87 years, she’s lived 400.”
Yoko Ono was born in 1933 into a Tokyo banking family whose fortunes suffered during World War II. The family faced starvation and was often forced to barter household items for food while they sought refuge from Allied bombing raids.
Despite the wartime deprivations, Ono inherited her family’s business acumen. In addition to becoming an avant-garde artist who once opened her show at MoMA by screaming into a microphone, she is also a hard-nosed businesswoman — a prodigious investor in real estate who, after her marriage to John in 1969, began to amass a mini-empire of properties that spanned New York City, the Hudson Valley, the Hamptons, Palm Beach, Ireland and England. She has also collected a sizable art collection that includes works by her old friend Andy Warhol.
Today, Ono has reported assets of $700 million. She still owns multimillion-dollar properties in Manhattan as well as hundreds of rolling acres in upstate Delaware County, public records show. She lives in the same sprawling nine-room apartment, on the seventh floor of The Dakota, that she once shared with John. She also keeps an adjacent unit at the West 72nd Street building for visitors, and two small one-room spaces without kitchens that she uses for staff. And she has an office on the first floor that was once used by John as a recording studio.
“She would wake up early every morning, go downstairs to the studio and handle the family business, allowing John to be a househusband,” said Mintz, adding that John had no real business sense, and often needed her help to figure out the most mundane financial matters, such as how much to tip a waiter when he paid for a meal at a restaurant.
But Ono has been shedding assets. In 2017, she sold a building at 110 W. 79th St. that she had owned since 1988. She bought the property, housing two residential units, for just under $500,000 and unloaded it for $6,450,000, public records show. In 2013, she sold a 5,700-square-foot penthouse at 49-51 Downing St. in the West Village, which Sean occupied for years, for $8.3 million.
Although Ono still owns more than 600 acres near the town of Franklin, NY, locals say it’s been ages since they saw her in the area where she used to vacation with Sean and groups of friends. John and Ono bought the property and 100 Holstein cattle to set up a breeding operation before he was gunned down in front of The Dakota on Dec. 8, 1980.
“We haven’t seen her for a very long time,” said Roland Greefkes, an iron artisan who made a wrought-iron gate for Ono’s property. “I never met anyone quite like her. She is really something special.”
That sentiment is echoed by the directors of charities she has long supported. Although the charity she began with John, the Spirit Foundations, had contributions of only just under $25,000 from her in 2018, Ono does most of her charitable giving directly. At the start of the coronavirus pandemic in New York, she donated $250,000 to Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, to support frontline health-care workers.
“Montefiore was specifically chosen because Yoko wanted to assist a hospital in a community hit hard by COVID that didn’t have the ability to turn to wealthy donors and board members the way Cornell, NYU, Mount Sinai and others in Manhattan can,” said Mintz.
She has also recently supported musicians she has worked with in the past who have fallen on hard times. She helped Stanley Bronstein, who played in her Plastic Ono Band, when he needed emergency medical care, Mintz said.
But hunger remains her pet cause. “I remember being hungry and I know it’s so difficult to just be hungry,” Ono said in a 2013 interview. “One day I didn’t bring a lunchbox. The other kids asked, don’t you want to eat? I just said, no, I’m not hungry.”
Ono recently donated $50,000 to the West Side Campaign Against Hunger, which during the pandemic has provided thousands of meals to out-of-work and needy residents in her Upper West Side neighborhood. And she has a 30-year relationship with WhyHunger, a New York-based nonprofit fighting food deprivation around the world.
“She has been a true philanthropic partner,” Noreen Springstead, the group’s executive director, told. “She is the most energetic, the most vivacious person and is very hands-on. She has been incredibly invested for more than three decades.”
