Saturday 25 June 2022 12:51 AM How Yoko Ono picked a young beauty to be John Lennon's new lover and then ... trends now

Saturday 25 June 2022 12:51 AM How Yoko Ono picked a young beauty to be John Lennon's new lover and then ... trends now
Saturday 25 June 2022 12:51 AM How Yoko Ono picked a young beauty to be John Lennon's new lover and then ... trends now

Saturday 25 June 2022 12:51 AM How Yoko Ono picked a young beauty to be John Lennon's new lover and then ... trends now

May Pang was clearly up to a challenge. Fresh out of school at 19, she had talked her way into a coveted job at the New York offices of The Beatles' music company Apple Records.

She was outgoing and rebellious but also amenable, and John Lennon and wife Yoko Ono liked her so much they soon asked her to become their personal assistant.

The rock 'n' roll-mad daughter of Chinese immigrants from Spanish Harlem enjoyed every minute of her time with the couple — the union many believed broke up the Fab Four.

Pang was soon helping them in the recording studio, accompanying them to the UK and their country mansion at Tittenhurst Park, Ascot, and proving so engaging and photogenic that David Bailey shot her as part of a Lennon-Ono album cover.

Pang bought John and Yoko's groceries and answered the phone — and she also supplied backing vocals on some of their songs including the 1971 hit single Happy Christmas (War Is Over). Then, one morning in 1973, when she turned up for work at their home in Manhattan's Dakota building, it suddenly became a little more complicated.

'Yoko walked into my office and said: 'John and I are not getting along and I know he's going to start seeing other people. And I want you to go out with him as I think he needs someone nice like you',' says Pang in a new documentary film. Of course, it was the bed-hopping 1970s but Pang rapidly realised she was in way over her head.

John Lennon pictured with May Pang, who he had an affair with towards the end of the 70s. In the Lost Weekend: A Love Story documentary, Pang insists that she and Lennon fell in love and Ono had to fight hard to win him back

John Lennon pictured with May Pang, who he had an affair with towards the end of the 70s. In the Lost Weekend: A Love Story documentary, Pang insists that she and Lennon fell in love and Ono had to fight hard to win him back

Still only 22 — Lennon was 10 years older and Ono seven years older than him — she was, she says, 'a naive kid . . . very, very young'.

She knew Ono 'had some very weird ideas' but she was still stunned — and refused.

But Lennon had told his wife he found their pretty, leggy assistant sexually attractive, and Ono waved away the girl's objections.

'She said: 'It's OK. You should do it.' She thought it was the best thing since I didn't have a boyfriend,' recalls Pang.

The strong-willed Ono was confident she could control the much younger woman. And so began one of the most bizarre episodes in rock music history, in which Lennon embarked on an 18-month affair with Pang and a riotous move to Los Angeles, reunited musically with Paul McCartney and fell in with a gang of hard-drinking and drug-taking celebrity hell-raisers known as the Hollywood Vampires.

Lennon would later disparagingly refer to this part of his life as his 'Lost Weekend' (a reference to the 1945 film in which Ray Milland plays a writer struggling with alcoholism). But by then he was back with Ono, so he had to be diplomatic.

Lennon and Pang. Pang is intent on dispelling the 'myth' that Ono had their affair entirely under control and that it was the older woman who decided John and his lover should move to LA in September 1973 without her

Lennon and Pang. Pang is intent on dispelling the 'myth' that Ono had their affair entirely under control and that it was the older woman who decided John and his lover should move to LA in September 1973 without her

And Ono, as keeper of the eternal Lennon flame, has done her best to keep herself near the centre. She hasn't denied John's affair with Pang was her idea, saying she realised she and her husband needed 'a rest' and that Pang was a 'very intelligent, attractive woman and extremely efficient'.

However, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story — which just had its premier at this year's Tribeca Festival — gives Pang's version of events. She insists that she and Lennon fell in love and that Ono, discovering she'd made a serious misjudgment, had to fight hard to win him back.

The documentary, which Pang narrates, features contributions from others close to Lennon including his son Julian, who say the Beatle never seemed more happy than in the months he spent with Pang.

While Julian credits the sweet-natured Pang with reuniting him and his mother Cynthia with Lennon, Ono emerges badly from the film.

Pang, now 71, claims that, even before the eccentric Japanese artist mooted the idea of her PA having an affair with her husband, she made her deceive Lennon about his son.

Julian, then only a little boy, would occasionally ring to speak to his father. Pang says Ono insisted the calls had to go through her and repeatedly told her to say Lennon couldn't come to the phone.

'I was taken aback,' she says. On the third occasion Julian called, she claims Ono relented but — according to Pang — told her that if Lennon ever asked if Julian had phoned previously, she was to deny it. 'I lied to John and to Julian and it hurt,' she says. 'Yoko was using me, simple as that, and not for the last time.'

John Lennon with his wife, Yoko Ono, speaking at a news conference in New York City in the 70s. Ono is believed to have encouraged the affair with Pang, saying she and her husband 'needed a rest'

John Lennon with his wife, Yoko Ono, speaking at a news conference in New York City in the 70s. Ono is believed to have encouraged the affair with Pang, saying she and her husband 'needed a rest'

Sometimes dismissed as a starry-eyed groupie who exploited the cracks in the Lennon-Ono marriage, Pang insists it was her employers who made the affair happen.

She says she initially had no romantic feelings towards Lennon but he pursued her, one day grabbing her and kissing her in a lift. She claims she recoiled — although he won her round. 'Before I knew it John Lennon charmed the pants off me,' she recalls. After they'd made love for the first time, she started to cry and asked him what it meant for their relationship.

He said he didn't know but the following day he got out his guitar and played her a song — Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox) — he'd written about a girl who 'gets me through this goddawful loneliness'. It did the trick. 'I knew how much John meant to me but until that moment I didn't know how much I meant to John,' she says.

But their affair wasn't easy. 'John and I spent nights together and every morning I would go to the Dakota and see Yoko. It was not a comfortable situation,' she says.

Pang is intent on dispelling the 'myth' that Ono had their affair entirely under control and that it was the older woman who decided John and his lover should move to LA in September 1973 without her.

That was Lennon's brainwave, says Pang, and Ono had cut off her salary by the time their plane touched down. They ran around the city like 'little teenagers' with next to no money as he was in

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