Roberta Flack, the Grammy Award-winning singer of “Killing Me Softly,” lives next door to Ono. In “Roberta,” a documentary about Flack, Sean Lennon said, “At first, you know, I didn’t even think Roberta was a phenomenal artist and musician, she was just a really great neighbor. We used to call her Aunt Roberta.”
“We are very close to each other and our kitchens are interconnected,” Ms. Ono said in the documentary.
Erika Belle heard the stories. So when Keith Haring, a friend of Belle’s, invited her to dinner at Miss Ono’s apartment on a rainy Tuesday night in the 1980s, she screamed. “I have been obsessed with that building, like many New Yorkers all my life, for many years,” Belle, in her 60s, said in an interview. “It has too much of the old-fashioned, glitzy Hollywood of the 50s.”
Belle, who co-owns the Lucky Strike nightclub and is a model, said: “Going to that building and knowing I was going to see Yoko, it was like ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘Happy Birthday’ merging into one. Belle was also a back-up dancer for Madonna, who she said went to Dakota with her that night.
After taking off her shoes to enter, the first thing Belle noticed about Ms Ono’s apartment was “how high the ceilings and wide the hallways are. You can drive through those corridors.”
The dinner menu was simply takeout from a Chinese restaurant, but the highlight of the night was being led by Ms. Ono on a tour of the apartment. “She held my hand – even saying it now, I still get goosebumps – and asked, ‘Do you want to see the apartment?’”
