In 1980 Dalí sent Yoko Ono a dry blade of grass for 10,000 dollars instead of a hair

How Salvador Dalí Sold Yoko Ono a Blade of Grass for $10,000.

Some episodes from the life of Salvador Dalí, for all their plausibility, may seem entirely apocryphal: a kind of definition of Surrealism itself.

Yoko Ono and Salvador Dalí first met in 1969, when Ono and John Lennon were travelling around Europe on their honeymoon. The newlyweds met Dalí in Paris, at a lunch at the Hotel Meurice. They were introduced by the photographer Robert Whitaker, who had toured with the Beatles in the mid-1960s.

The friendship between Dalí and Ono continued after Lennon's death. In 1980 a truly surrealist story took place between them. According to Amanda Lear, the cult French singer and actress who became Dalí's muse in 1965, Ono asked Dalí for a hair from his famous moustache. Ono was prepared to pay, yet Dalí hesitated. He was worried that Ono might use his hair for occult purposes. I am certain that is exactly what would have happened; just consider the biography of this woman.

"He did not want to send her a personal item, let alone his hair," Lear recalled in an interview with the French magazine VSD in 2012.

Being a man not short of imagination, Dalí found a way out and, instead of a hair, sent Ono a dry blade of grass for $10,000. Well done, that man!

"All his life he loved to fleece people. Dalí could not resist when someone waved a big cheque under his nose," was how Lear summed up the story.

A love of money explains the enthusiasm with which Dalí took on advertising commissions for Iberia, Nissan, Wrigley's, Chupa Chups, Alka-Seltzer and Johnson Paint, and, towards the end of his career, turned ever more often to mass-produced prints.