It was an astonishing suggestion even from a woman who had staged a bed-in for the global media to promote world peace during her honeymoon. But when Yoko Ono demanded John Lennon’s assistant May Pang become his lover, she set in train a series of bizarre events the former Beatle would later refer to as his “Lost Weekend”.
Lennon’s separation from Ono – a period of excess and, later, deep regret – actually lasted 18 months. And while Lennon and Ono spoke of what became one of the strangest tales in late 20th century pop culture, the third of the threesome, Lennon’s 22-year-old lover, has remained largely silent.
Now 73, May recalls in a vivid new documentary how the affair came about after Ono, who met Lennon at an exhibition of her art in 1966 and married him in 1969, heard her husband having sex with another woman during a drunken party.
“So, I wasn’t surprised,” says May, “when she walked into my office soon afterwards. ‘John and I are not getting along,’ she said. ‘I know he’s going to start seeing other women. I want you to go out with him because he needs someone nice like you.’
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“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I said: ‘But he’s your husband.’ I told her I couldn’t do as she asked. She said, ‘Yes, you will,’ and walked out of the room.”
It was jaw-dropping in the extreme, but even before all of this, May’s own story is fascinating. Born and brought up as a first-generation Chinese American in Spanish Harlem in New York, May was ignored by her father.
“Because I was a girl, my father, in true Chinese tradition, adopted a son and pretty much abandoned me. My mother had both beauty and brains,” she continues.
“She opened her own Chinese laundry. Stuck at home with my father, I was inspired by my mother to get up – and get out.”
At 18, she dropped out of college and headed to Times Square in search of a job. From a young age, she’d been hooked on rock‘n’roll and particularly The Beatles. Fetching up outside 1700 Broadway, she realised the building was home to Apple Records. Without further ado, May took the lift to the 41st floor and blagged her way into a job. Within weeks, her favourite group had called it a day.
In August 1971, John and Yoko moved to New York where Apple assigned them to “the youngest rock‘n’roller” in the office. May’s life was never to be the same again. Within months, they’d asked her to leave Apple and become their full-time assistant. “I felt like I was living someone else’s life,” says May.
The Nixon administration was implacably opposed to John, branding him “an enemy of the state”. In November 1972, he decided they should live somewhere more secure than Greenwich Village and took an apartment in the legendary Dakota Building on Central Park West.
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But it only partially put John’s mind at rest. His solo career wasn’t going well and he and Paul were still feuding. The strain was beginning to take a toll on the Lennons’ marriage. Yoko felt she had to act.
All these years later, May understands that this was just one more demonstration of Yoko controlling a situation. “She’d release John to have a bit of fun and then she’d reel him back in when she judged it to be the right moment.”
But what Yoko hadn’t quite bargained for was the Lost Weekend mushrooming into an increasingly intense 18-month affair.
In the early weeks, it was John, insists May, who made all the running.
“One day, we were in the elevator. He looked me in the eye, he whispered in my ear and then he grabbed me and kissed me. Before I knew it, John Lennon had charmed the pants off me. We’d spend night after night together in my apartment and then, every morning, I’d go to the Dakota and see Yoko.”
Something had to give.
“One day, John announced we had to get away from Yoko and, that evening, we were on a plane to LA. That’s when the Lost Weekend really began. Yoko cut off my salary the moment we landed in California. But we didn’t care.
“We were like teenagers in love.”
The new documentary, appropriately titled Lost Weekend, traces the arc of that relationship alongside Yoko’s self-appointed role as puppet master. It’s the first opportunity May has had, some 50 years after the event, to set the record straight.
She’s an enormously likeable woman: warm, no-nonsense and without a trace of bitterness – no mean achievement given her see-saw life with the Lennons.
“Well, yes,” she says, with her easy smile, “but then what would be the point of being bitter?”
Back in LA in 1973, John started hanging out with Alice Cooper, Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon, if he was in town, and various other hard drinkers. For a while, it was great fun for a man whose life had been lived in the public eye since his early twenties.
“He was getting to hang out with his friends and have a lot of fun,” she says. “And, because I was 10 years younger, we were getting to do all the things young couples do.”
But as the Lost Weekend progressed, Lennon’s behaviour started spiralling out of control. May felt she had no choice but to return to New York and review the relationship. “Eventually, I called Yoko to tell her I was back alone. She was adamant. ‘You’ve got to go back to him right away,’ she said. His first wife, Cynthia, and their son, Julian, were due in LA. ‘He can’t deal with them by himself.’”
Ono would call May as many as ten times a day – often in the middle of the night – for a full debrief on what was happening. “She was beginning to realise that our short fling had turned into a big love affair.” When Harry Nilsson suggested that John produce an album for him, Lennon rented a house on LA’s Pacific Coast Highway and surrounded himself with friends including Ringo. They’d all set off for the studio each morning.
Harry, John and May were listening to playback one day when the door to the studio opened and who should walk in but Paul and Linda McCartney.
“John turned to Paul as if the last five years of animosity and anger hadn’t existed and said: ‘Hey Paul, we’re about to jam. Want to join?’ Which is exactly what happened.”
The next day, Paul and Linda came over to the beach house. “I remember thinking this was quite a moment. What I didn’t realise was that Paul was there to deliver a message from Yoko.”
Recalls Paul: “I took him in the back room, almost like a big brother. I told him I was the go-between. I asked him outright, ‘Do you still love Yoko? Do you want to get back with her?’ John simply told him, ‘I’m with May’.”
In time, they moved back into a penthouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
“My first live-in boyfriend was John Lennon,” May smiles today. “We even had two cats: Major and Minor, black and white, like the keys on a piano.”
On November 17, 1974, they were invited to an off-Broadway production of Sergeant Pepper. “We took our seats and then, out of the blue, Yoko showed up. I offered to give up my seat but John said, ‘Have her sit at the back.’ She wasn’t pleased. She turned to me and said, ‘I’m thinking of taking John back.’ I said nothing.” The following January, John told May he was going to New Orleans to see Paul and Linda who were working on a new album.
“He told me he’d be back soon. When he walked out of the apartment, I had a strange feeling I wasn’t going to see him back there again.”
Whenever May tried to reach him by phone, Yoko answered. “He was sleeping. He was in session. She wouldn’t let me speak to him. Finally, after I don’t know how many attempts, I told her that John and I had a dental appointment in New York on the Monday.
“It’s where we met up and he was different: he was confused, remote. It was almost like he’d been brainwashed. After the appointment, he started heading off in the opposite direction. I asked him where he was going. ‘Home,’ he said. I said, ‘Well, home is this way.’
“So, he turned around, walked up to me and said, ‘Listen, Yoko has allowed me to come home.’ Allowed?! We were about to buy a house in Montauk on Long Island. But I knew I’d lost him. I called her. I said, ‘Well, you should be happy now. You got John back.’ She said, ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be happy.’ And then she said she had to go.”
For the next five years, May and John saw each other, on and off.
“We were intimate although Yoko had no knowledge of that,” she continues. “Then he called one day. He was in Cape Town. He said: ‘We have to find a way for us to be together. It was the last time I ever spoke to him.” On December 8, 1980, Lennon, aged just 40, was shot dead by a lone gunman, Mark Chapman, outside the Dakota Building. May sent a note to Ono after the assassination. “I wrote that there were no words at a horrible time like this. But I heard nothing back.”
The only time they’ve met from that day to this was when they found themselves, quite by chance, staying in the same hotel in Iceland in October 2005 on what would have been Lennon’s birthday.
“At breakfast, we were in the same restaurant. So, I walked up to Yoko. Eventually, she acknowledged me. I told her I wanted to wish her well with her latest project. She inclined her head, thanked me and that was it. A few minutes later, she stood at the door of the restaurant and started waving to me and asking if I was okay. I knew what she was doing. The room was full of journalists and she wanted to look good in front of them.”
Ask her to assess Yoko Ono with hindsight and she chooses her words with extreme care. “She could be kind to me but there were things she did that I didn’t feel were right. Initially, for instance, she forbade me from putting Julian through on the phone to talk to his father. That was wrong: he was a child. But that’s something she has to live with, not me.”
So, is it fair to describe Ono as a control freak? Long pause.
“Yes,” she says, “I would agree with that.”
Nine years after John’s death, May married record producer Tony Visconti, former husband of Welsh folk singer, Mary Hopkin.
They had two children, Sebastian and Lara, and divorced in 2000.
Not for a moment, though, does she regret the so-called Lost Weekend. “Why would I? The journalist, Larry Kane, wrote a book about John. He told Larry that his happiest times were spent with me.
“I loved John very much indeed,” says May. “It was nice to be told how much he loved me. No one can take that away.”
- The Lost Weekend is out now on the Icon Film Channel and will be available on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital Download from December 18
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