May Pang on her 18-month love affair with John Lennon: ‘Yoko has erased me’

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The final time John Lennon’s one-time lover May Pang was visited by his ghost, it was whereas she was watching an episode of Law & Order. “But when you talk about stuff like this, people think you’re imagining it or are a little crazy,” the 73-year-old says. “So I don’t ever talk about it.”

For somebody so savvy, Pang is astonishingly harmless. Or possibly it’s the opposite method spherical. She grew up loving The Beatles and met Lennon in 1970, when she was 22 (he was 10 years older). A receptionist for Allen Klein, she was – a 12 months later – working as a private assistant for each Lennon and his avant-garde artist spouse Yoko Ono whereas they lived at New York’s Dakota Building. Lennon and Ono had been having issues of their marriage; it’s a matter of document that Ono determined Pang can be a helpful distraction. Having inspired Lennon to make a transfer on Pang, she ordered Pang to conform. Pang had her doubts, however was too junior (and, as soon as Lennon kissed her, dazzled) to demur.

A brand new documentary on the pair’s relationship – titled The Lost Weekend: A Love Story – explores what occurred subsequent. Pang and Lennon lived collectively in LA and New York. They hung out with Lennon’s younger son, Julian, who he had together with his first spouse, Cynthia Powell, and who’d been saved at arm’s size by Ono. They additionally frolicked with Paul, George and Ringo and did peculiar boyfriend and girlfriend stuff (if being taught to play guitar by a musical legend counts as peculiar).

Over Zoom from her house in New York, Pang has the air of somebody decided to age disgracefully: she’s carrying purple lipstick, has purple streaks in her gray hair and is given to naughty chuckles. She holds up her arms. “I don’t have the fingers for it, but John’s teaching me how to play ‘Ain’t that a shame’,” she says. “He said, ‘This is what my mum taught me, on the banjo.’ And I’m like, ‘Is this good? Cos it doesn’t sound good!’”

For each she and Lennon it was a genuinely inventive interval. He wrote a track about Pang, referred to as “Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)” on the album Walls and Bridges (which accommodates Lennon’s solely solo No 1 US single, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night”). Pang helped produce the album and likewise supplied backing vocals on the monitor “#9 Dream”. While they had been in LA, Lennon drank like a fish, was continuously moody and might be violent. But, in accordance with Pang, that they had a blast on the entire.

Then, in January 1975 – simply earlier than a deliberate journey to see Paul and Linda McCartney in New Orleans, and days after making a suggestion on a Long Island, New York home – Lennon returned to the Dakota. And Yoko. He gave interviews wherein he described the 18 months he’d spent with Pang as a “lost weekend”. He stated of Pang, “she always knew the score”. Pang was horrified, although didn’t (and nonetheless doesn’t) blame Lennon. “I understand why he did it,” she tells me. “I’d worked at the Dakota, remember? He wasn’t happy about saying it. He was just appeasing Yoko.”

One of the largest revelations within the new documentary is that Lennon and Pang remained shut within the 5 years that adopted. They had been sexually intimate. But, undeniably, Pang’s position had modified. “She [Ono] said to him that he needed to live at the Dakota because of his immigration status,” she says. “That was his weak spot: he wanted to live in America. He said, ‘We don’t want the government to say, ‘You’re running all over the place’. So I said to him, ‘What happens to us?’ He goes, ‘Nothing, I can still see you!” And I stated, ‘That doesn’t make sense to me.’ I didn’t settle for it, however I needed to settle for it, if you realize what I imply.”

After Yoko learnt she was pregnant, Lennon went to Pang’s flat and advised her that it might be a Scorpio child and that he knew “how to handle that”. Pang smiles. “That was an in-joke, because I’m a Scorpio. Then he said, ‘Don’t you wish it was yours? I mean, ours? I wish it was!’ And I just had to mentally walk away from that statement. Here’s Yoko pregnant and he’s saying he wishes it was me. And I’m saying, ‘Well, it isn’t!’ That’s all I said”.

She resists the concept that Lennon was simply stringing her alongside all through their relationship. But even once they had been formally an merchandise, Lennon by no means met Pang’s mom. Surely that was a crimson flag? Pang shakes her head and says it was Lennon’s insecurity that made him conceal every time her mom got here spherical. One night time, Pang referred to as up her mom. She adopts a teenagery voice. “I said, ‘I’m hungry. Mom, can you make fried rice?’” Pang grins. “She made the best fried rice and she says, ‘fine’, cos she lived close by. So then my mom comes to the door and she says, ‘Everything OK?’ John’s still saying he’s ‘not ready’ to meet her, so he’s in the other room. Mom just says, ‘Here [the rice] is’ and walks away. Later, when we were not quote ‘together’, me and John were in the apartment, eating Chinese food, and John says, ‘I really wish now that I’d met your mom!’”

Pang sighs. “I was glad he mentioned it to me. That he thought about it. My mom offered unconditional love, which is something John didn’t get from his family. He lost his mom. His dad was not around for years, then all of a sudden was saying in the newspapers, ‘My son doesn’t care for me!’ John was so conflicted about his own personal life.” She shrugs. “It’s what he and Yoko had in common.”

It drives Pang mad when she and Ono are conflated. Lennon has usually been described as somebody who “liked Asian women”. When I carry this up, Pang pulls an I’m-about-to-barf face. Nor is she impressed by journalists who put the hostility between she and Ono all the way down to “in-fighting”. “They think we didn’t get on because she was Japanese and I’m Chinese. These people don’t do their homework!” For Pang, class is extra vital than race: “We come from two different backgrounds.” She growls: “I don’t come from a privileged background”.

She’s keen to acknowledge that Ono, seen by some followers and far of the press as the lady who broke up The Beatles, has been the sufferer of a hideous quantity of racism and misogyny. Honestly, although, it’s not a line of thought Pang is all for pursuing. In case you’ll be able to’t inform, she thinks Ono wielded immense energy and infrequently used it nicely.

Pang shudders once I point out the well-known Annie Leibovitz {photograph} of Lennon, taken on the day he was murdered, in 1980. It exhibits Lennon bare and curled up like a child, subsequent to a fully-dressed Ono. “I hated that photo!” exclaims Pang. “She was supposed to get naked but at the last minute said no. I just thought he didn’t have to show that side of him. He didn’t have to look that vulnerable. I thought it was horrible.”

After Lennon’s dying, Pang moved on along with her life (she has two kids from her marriage to cult music producer, Tony Visconti, who she divorced in 2000). But every time she bumped into Ono, issues had been fraught. In 2010, Pang attended an exhibition of Julian’s pictures. Ono and her son with Lennon, Sean, had been there, too. “I was not allowed to be photographed anywhere near them,” she says. “The other person who wasn’t allowed to be photographed was Pattie Boyd [George Harrison’s ex and a former crush of Lennon’s]. We were just ignored.”

Though most critics have given The Lost Weekend: A Love Story a thumbs up, virtually each reviewer has commented on its bias towards Ono. “Let me put it this way,” says Pang, “everybody says it’s unfair to her… but it works both ways. If you go back in the past, she’s erased me, like I didn’t exist.” Pang clutches her pendant necklace and appears flushed. “It’s not her movie. I put in things that happened to me. And if it isn’t flattering to her, what am I supposed to do?”

Ono shall be 91 in February. Isn’t it time to present peace an opportunity? Pang shakes her head, wearily. “No. Everything that needed to be said has already been said.” She feels in a different way in the case of Sean. “If Sean wanted to have a conversation with me, if he wanted to reach out, I would be here, absolutely. I’m not opposed to him. When it comes to the situation between his mother and myself, he’s an innocent party.”

Pang’s happy with the truth that her movie is an “indie” undertaking, including that she stayed away from massive studios due to how Warner Bros handled her when she wrote her 1983 memoir, Loving John. “They wanted it to be as salacious as that book about The Doors [Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman’s biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive.] They kept adding words. It was really more their book than mine.” Even so, she questioned whether or not The Lost Weekend was a sensible funding of her time. Enter Lennon’s ghost.

Just a few months in the past, Pang was watching Law & Order and, on the similar time, speaking to John in her head. “I was asking him, ‘Will things work out with the film?’ I wanted him to give me a sign. I look up and a character says, ‘You know, it’s whatever gets you through the night!’” Pang bounces in her chair. “And I’m like, ‘OK! Got it!’”

She says she felt Lennon’s presence from the second he was shot useless outdoors the Dakota, however, initially, brushed it off. “Then my friend calls and she says ‘John’s been trying to reach you!’ I’m like ‘I know!’ She’s like, ‘Well, try and answer him!’” Nowadays, Pang loves the “little messages” from Lennon. “It’s not necessarily every day that he comes to me. But it’s like Julian says, he knows his father’s thinking of him when he sees a white feather. We all have our little moments.”

Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary – launched to raves in 2021 – put hearth within the stomach of Beatlemania. Last month, the AI-enhanced “Now and Then”, hyped as The Beatles’ “final” track, made historical past when it turned a UK No 1. Pang views it as “good closure for Paul and Ringo” and appears to have made peace with the truth that closure, for herself, is out of attain. Instead she’s embraced a ghost who won’t ever go away her. In her thoughts, not less than, she’s nonetheless dwelling the dream.

‘The Lost Weekend: A Love Story’ is accessible to observe on the Icon Film Channel and, from 18 December, on DVD, Blu-ray and digital platforms