A conversation remembered by Paul McCartney has offered a glimpse into how Yoko Ono reflected on her late husband John Lennon shortly after his death.
Lennon and Ono were married from March 1969 until his death on December 8, 1980.
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In an interview with Vanity Fair conducted in 2015 and published last week to coincide with the documentary Man on the Run about McCartney’s life after The Beatles, McCartney recalled receiving a call from Ono.
He said: “I swear she rang me shortly after John died and said, ‘You know, I think John might have been gay.’”
“I went, ‘I’m not sure,’” he added.
“I said, ‘I don’t think so. Certainly not when I knew him’.”
“Because we’d been in the ’60s and had been around with loads and loads of girls, and I saw him getting a lot of girl action.”
“And I’d slept with John very often, but there was never anything, never a gesture or expression, so I had no reason to believe this at all.”
McCartney said he had heard rumours about Lennon’s sexuality, including speculation about his relationship with Brian Epstein, who was gay, but he did not personally believe anything had happened between them.
Lennon and Ono married in March 1969 and remained together until Lennon was murdered in New York in December 1980 at the age of 40 by obsessed fan Mark David Chapman.
