May Pang got “no closure” after her affair with John Lennon
In the leadup to the film The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, May Pang opened up about her long-term affair with John Lennon in the mid-1970s. Lennon coined the phrase ‘the lost weekend’ for his long separation from Yoko Ono when he moved to California and recorded the covers album Rock and Roll.
During the early stages of Lennon and Ono’s separation, Ono picked Pang to be Lennon’s girlfriend during his time in California. Pang had been an assistant for the Lennons until then and was asked by Ono to go out with her husband.
When talking about her relationship with Lennon, Pang mentioned she had little say in Ono’s plan, telling AOL, “I was not a willing participant. … It’s only later that you start seeing that there was a motive behind all this, on her side, of what was going on”.
Due to Lennon’s partying, Pang also mentioned Ono wanting a divorce, continuing, “John had to come back to New York for immigration purposes, and I heard they were going to meet in the lawyer’s office to go over things. She wanted to tell him at the lawyer’s office with other people that she wanted a divorce because she was afraid he was going to go off the deep end”.
After returning to New York in 1975, Lennon reunited with Ono and remained together after his murder in 1980. Pang did stay on good terms with Lennon, remembering, “Over the next five years, the man liked to make phone calls to me, talk to me, see if I’m OK. We never lost that contact. It became even more complicated as time went on”.
Pang also mentioned the possibility of her and Lennon reuniting when remembering her last memories of Lennon, saying, “I think if it would happen, it was going to happen — until, obviously, the universe ended it for me. It ended it for a lot of people, but it ended it for us in that way, because our relationship never died”.
Speaking about their time together, Pang mentioned moving forward past her relationship fracturing in 1980, remarking, “I don’t have closure. But I have to do something. I can’t sit there and mourn for the rest of my life on that. You have him in a special part of your life, in your heart, and then you say, “OK, just guide me to the next level”.
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