YokoOnodidnt break up the Beatles, she kept the band together and Lennon from falling apart: book

For decades, many have blamed Yoko Ono for breaking up the Beatles.But, according to a new book, Ono may have actually prolonged the life of the seminal rock band — and of John Lennon himself.

“There’s a version of the Beatles story in which there’d be no ‘Let It Be’ or ‘Abbey Road’ without Yoko.During the writing and recording of those albums, John had a foot out the door.

If he hadn’t had Yoko, the other foot might have followed sooner than it did,” David Sheff writes in his expansive new book, “Yoko: A Biography,” (Simon & Schuster, out now).“She accompanied John — literally holding his hand sometimes — to the sessions that resulted in the final Beatles albums,” continues Sheff, who interviewed the couple extensively in the month before Lennon’s death in December 1980.Klaus Voormann, Lennon’s friend and the couple’s bandmate, notes that before he met Ono, Lennon had become so unhappy with his life that it would sometimes leave him in tears. “Before he was with Yoko, John was in really bad shape,” Voormann says in the book.

“When Yoko came, that changed one hundred percent.She gave him what he needed.”Ono was born to one of Japan’s wealthiest and most influential families on February 18, 1933. Her Tokyo childhood contained a multitude of servants and all the trappings of wealth, but it was also one of “emotional poverty,” according to the book.Ono’s parents were not only emotionally distant, they shielded her from other children believing she was “too good for them,” and that they would “take advantage of her.”“Yoko survived her childhood by escaping into her imagination,” writes Sheff.

“She instinctively turned inward, spending hours sketching in a notebook and making up stories.”In March of 1945, she was just 12-years-old when the United States firebombed the Japanese capital in the final stages of World War II.Her family was safely ensconced in a bomb shelter in their garden, but ...