The Lost Weekend: What happened between John Lennon and May Pang?
Commonly termed ‘The Lost Weekend’, the description granted to the romance between John Lennon and May Pang couldn’t be more inaccurate.
Of course, this wasn’t just a weekend, which already makes the label inaccurate in terms of time. More importantly, it completely undermines how significant this connection was in John Lennon’s life and in the story of his final years.
It fails to capture how vital Pang was, not only in Lennon’s romantic life and his marriage to Yoko Ono, but also in his career and family life. It also reduces Pang as a person, overlooking her own career as both an artist and a music executive, as well as her connections with the wider Beatles circle.
This wasn’t just a ‘lost weekend’, not in the slightest. This was an 18-month-long romance and period of reflection and rearrangement for John Lennon. For over a year, he turned his life around, all with someone other than his wife by his side.
What really happened between John Lennon and May Pang?
1970: Enter May Pang
In 1970, The Beatles were basically done and dusted. The band knew they were over, but the final nail in the coffin was currently being hammered in thanks to Allen Klein, a truly dastardly music manager.
Klein had already messed up The Rolling Stones’ finances so badly that they’d had to go on the run from their taxes. Having been warned about this, Paul McCartney was fighting tooth and nail against it when Lennon suggested Klein be their new manager.
Where does May Pang come into all this? Well, in 1970, in New York, Pang found herself a new job. After doing some modelling and then working various roles in the music industry as a song plugger or within music publishing, she landed a role at ABKCO Records, Allen Klein’s management company. Pretty quickly, she was working a lot for Klein’s three main clients: John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison.
1971: The Lennons move to Manhattan
While Pang was working for Klein, Yoko Ono would call on her a lot. They seemed to gravitate together as two Asian women surrounded by white men, so when Ono and Lennon needed help with projects, like their films Up Your Legs Forever and Fly, Klein would send Pang to go support them.
After building up a relationship like that, Ono and Lennon offered Pang a job as their own personal assistant when they moved to New York in 1971. From then on, she not only worked even closer with their projects, being heard a lot in the documentary One To One as Pang would help coordinate their various goings-ons, but she was also deeply embedded in their daily life; Pang was basically part of the family at this point.
1973: Mind Games
After a few years settling in and getting busy, Ono and Lennon seemed to be struggling. Lennon especially seemed to be spiralling as his drinking and drug-taking were getting worse, and as Ono was being absolutely hounded and torn apart by the press, her husband was too busy having affairs to be there for her.
“People say I’m cool / Yeah, I’m a cool chick, baby,” Yoko Ono sings on her track ‘Death Of Samantha’. Written about a night in 1972 when Lennon cheated on her while she was in another room at the same party, Ono seemed to have had enough of pretending to be the cool, devoted wife as she added, “something in me died that day”. Soon after, at the start of 1973, the duo decided to separate for a while.
But, aptly titled for the album, Ono decided it wouldn’t be forever and sent in Pang to ensure that. Ono devised a plan for her to essentially be a fling for Lennon while also keeping an eye on him during his recording period. The idea of the lost weekend basically comes from that, as Ono hoped it would be that brief.
Pang at first refused Ono. She disagreed with the plan and never wanted to be involved with a married man. “She was asking me that, but, at the same time, she said: ‘You will!’” Pang said told The Guardian, recounting the conversation with Ono, “‘You don’t have a boyfriend, right?’ I said, ‘Yes, but please go to someone else with this’. Then she said, ‘You’re nice, and you don’t want him to go out with somebody that’s not going to be nice to him, right?’ I said, ‘Of course not’. So, she said, ‘You’re perfect’. I said ‘no’, and she kept saying ‘yes’.”
Lennon also seemed to be in on the plan, or at least knew that Pang was sent to the studio as his assistant and co-ordinator to keep an eye on him.
Summer 1973: The relationship begins
Regardless of Ono’s plan and Pang’s resistance, a closeness naturally formed between Lennon and his assistant. The singer had been needing a break for a while, as Pang recalled of the tension in the Lennon-Ono house: “They were like two magnets that were repelling against each other”.
But with the distance, with the joy of recording and with the energy between him and Pang, something in Lennon seemed to come alive again. Soon, he and Pang weren’t even just having an affair, they were a full-blown couple enjoying life together. “He was getting to hang out with his friends and have a lot of fun,” she said, “And, because I was ten years younger, we were getting to do all the things young couples do.”
After Mind Games was done, Lennon and Pang relocated to Los Angeles from New York. Moving out of his home with Ono, Lennon fully started a new life with Pang across the country.
Winter 1973 to spring 1974: A period of healing
It would be easy to colour this affair as a wild period in Lennon’s life, or one giant mistake, but really, it was more of a period of healing.
During their time in LA, Pang seemed especially passionate about helping Lennon reconnect with people from his past. With some distance from Ono, a lot of the tensions seemed easier to resolve, especially with his estranged family back in Liverpool. With her help, Lennon saw his son Julian for the first time in two years, inviting him out to the States to come and stay. He gave his son a guitar and taught him how to play, as Julian recalled to The Times later in his life, “We had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and had a great time in general when he was with May Pang. My memories of that time with Dad and May are very clear; they were the happiest time I can remember with them.”
Another relationship Pang helped to mend was with Paul McCartney. Having fallen out during the split, the two old friends reconnected after Pang rented a beach house in Santa Monica, where Lennon and Harry Nilsson jammed, inviting more people like Starr and Keith Moon to stay there, and eventually, extending the invite to McCartney, who came out to visit.
Summer 1974: The couple move back to New York
As Lennon started writing more and more songs, including ‘#9 Dream’ that was inspired by and features Pang, they decided to move back to New York so he could record. Still staying together, a year into their love, they got a new place together in Midtown and even adopted two cats.
The album he made then, Walls and Bridges, is a homage to their relationship. Her voice features, songs are written about her, and on one track, Julian plays drums as Pang’s influence in fixing their relationship went from strength to strength.
Their life kept rolling on like that as the duo truly were a tight couple by then, seemingly with every intention of staying together. Her influence also stayed seemingly powerful when it came to encouraging Lennon to create and collaborate, leading to him recording with David Bowie and Elton John, as she would help coordinate sessions.
February 1975: The abrupt ending
In early 1975, it seemed they were the strongest they’d ever been as John Lennon put in an offer for a house for them. Having visited Mick Jagger at Andy Warhol’s place in Montauk, they fell in love with the area and the quaint cottages. Seemingly planning to stay together, Lennon was planning to buy them one.
But then all of a sudden, the day after the couple were supposed to fly to New Orleans to visit McCartney, it was randomly over.
The re-entry of Yoko Ono
Around the time that Lennon and Julian reconnected, Pang recalled how Ono began to “call a million times a day”. Suddenly back and taking an interest, she said, “It was over nothing. She would say: ‘I just wanted you to know that I took a walk around the block’”. It seemed that Ono was beginning to get jealous and wanted her husband back, especially as it was becoming clear that Lennon was picking Pang over her, siding with his new partner in any arguments that arose.
But the reasons why Ono and Lennon suddenly reunited one day remain kind of a mystery. Pang maintains that she was totally blindsided by it, while Lennon started saying to the press, “We knew we were getting back together. It was just a matter of when. We knew. Everybody else might not have, but we did.”
Despite their relationship being long and settled with houses and cats and reunited friends, Lennon told NME, “No disrespect to anybody else I was having relationships with, but I feel like I was running around with me head off, and now I’ve got me head back on”.
Obviously, though, Pang did feel disrespected. In her eyes, the image Lennon then tried to portray of domestic bliss was bullshit. Even the singer’s friend Larry Kane claimed he once said, “You know, Larry, I may have been the happiest I’ve ever been… I loved this woman,” lamenting the loss of Pang even though publicly he was claiming to be overjoyed.
In Pang’s view of it, it all comes down to Yoko Ono, the mastermind. “I said: ‘Congratulations. You got John back. You should be very happy now’. Her response was very interesting to me,” she told The Guardian of a conversation with her old boss after all was said and done, “She said: ‘Happy? I don’t know if I’ll ever be happy’. To me, that didn’t sound like somebody warmly inviting that person back into their life.”
But either way, Lennon and Ono were back on, and all Pang had were the memories.
