The story of May Pang: How Yoko Ono came to regret hiring a young woman to be John Lennon's lover
May Pang was just a teenager and fresh out of school when she reportedly became John Lennon and Yoko Ono's personal assistant. But the young woman had no idea what she was getting into. Soon after getting hired, Pang reportedly began handling their chores - from assisting them in the recording studio to tagging along with them to the UK. Not just that, the Daily Mail reported that Pang also “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).”
However, things changed in 1973 when she was approached by Ono "to go out with Lennon". At the time, she was just 22.
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In the newly-released documentary – ‘The Lost Weekend: A Love Story’ — Pang has revealed: “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.’”
At first, Pang — “a naive kid . . . very, very young” — reportedly refused Yoko's offer but eventually obliged after Ono told her, “It's OK. You should do it.” The daughter of Chinese immigrants noted in the film, “She thought it was the best thing since I didn't have a boyfriend,” before revealing that Ono was quite sure that she could easily handle young women like her.
The late singer-songwriter’s second wife has reportedly always claimed that the so-called love affair between her husband and the PA was under her control, but the documentary tells a different story revealing Pang's side of the story. “She [Pang] 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,” The Daily Mail reported.
Pang reportedly said that she had no feelings for Lennon initially but he made her fall in love with him. “Before I knew it John Lennon charmed the pants off me,” she remembered. The Daily Mail report stated that after they had sex for the first time, she became emotional 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'.”
“I knew how much John meant to me but until that moment I didn't know how much I meant to John,” Pang declared as she added, “John and I spent nights together and every morning I would go to the Dakota and see Yoko. It was not a comfortable situation.”
Pang through the documentary has also disclosed that once Ono realized that her husband and the PA had feelings for each other and shifted to Los Angeles in September 1973 leaving her behind, she “cut off her salary by the time their plane touched down”.
The film also went on to show how Pang helped Lennon’s first wife Cynthia and their son Julian get back in touch with each other. “I was hoping they could get some kind of closure for Julian's sake,” she said. Then in 1974, Pang and Lennon started living in a small penthouse in New York. Things were going fine but then in November of the same year, the ex Beatle reunited with his wife backstage at Madison Square Garden after an Elton John gig.
In February 1975, Pang and Lennon were together in Long Island when Ono called her husband and asked him to come and see “a therapist who could break his nicotine habit through hypnosis. She suggested he return to their Dakota building home for treatment.” Lennon promised Pang that he would come back but that did not happen. However, they kept meeting each other “often intimately” for the next five years before Mark David Chapman shot him dead.