May Pang shares her intimate memories and rare photos from her 18-month relationship with John Lennon. Photo / Allison Robbert, The Washington Post
Do you ever talk to Yoko? someone in the crowd asked. Did Paul and George ever call Ringo “Richie”?
How did you meet John?
May Pang is used to the questions. She has devoted much of her life to recounting her affair a half-century ago with John Lennon, a period he memorably described as “the lost weekend that lasted 18 months,” one that catapulted her into Beatles lore.
Now 73, Pang is retelling her version of the story that began in 1973 when Yoko Ono encouraged her – then the couple’s 22-year-old assistant – to become Lennon’s lover. All these years later, Pang is travelling the country exhibiting photos she took of her famous paramour, a tour that last weekend reached Northern Virginia, where fans lined up for her autograph and a look at images fit for a family album.
Here was a picture of Lennon with a bowl of hot and sour soup in the Manhattan apartment they shared in 1974; here was another of Lennon playfully sticking out his tongue; here he was at Disney World, “a face in the crowd,” as Pang titled the image, a few months before he left her to return to Ono.
“I’m the closest they’re going to get to John Lennon,” Pang said as she signed photos for buyers. “What gives me pleasure is giving people the stories. And I’m able to give the stories because I was the one who was there.”
The tell-all memoir is nothing new in the annals of rock-and-roll. What sets Pang apart are the varied forms her storytelling has taken over the past four decades. Her memoir, Loving John, was published in 1983, three years after Lennon’s murder, followed by Instamatic Karma, a 2008 collection of her Lennon photos. In 2022, Pang was the subject of The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, a documentary in which she declares: “I was 23 and my first boyfriend was John Lennon.”
And now there’s her travelling photo show, which arrived this month at the Nepenthe Gallery and Frame Shop, tucked in an Alexandria strip mall behind an Exxon station and a pet food store.
Yes, the money she makes from the exhibit is part of the incentive, Pang said, sitting at a table with a stack of Lost Weekend posters she signed and sold for $50 a pop (“I like to pay my rent,” she said). But Pang, who grew up in Spanish Harlem and lives in Queens, also said her aim is to correct the “misconception” that Lennon “didn’t care about me and it wasn’t a real relationship,” a narrative that, over time, she has blamed Ono and her allies for perpetuating. “If this was you and someone took your story, how would you feel?”
Pang told the gallery crowd that Lennon, during his solo career, was the happiest and most creative while with her. He completed three albums in that period, including Mind Games, which was reissued this month, travelled regularly with Pang between New York and Los Angeles, and hung out with friends she refers to as “Elton” (John), “Mick” (Jagger), “Harry” (Nilsson), and “Paul and Linda” (McCartney).
Her photos, Pang said, are evidence that the period was not the booze-fuelled spree depicted by biographers and even Lennon himself when he told Playboy in 1980 that he had “never drunk so much in my life” and that “somebody was going to die” if he did not return to Ono.
“It was a happy time, it was a creative time,” Pang told the crowd at her opening.
Many praised her for sharing her past.
“Thank you for bringing this to the world,” Fran Redding, 81, told Pang as she gazed at her wall of photos, including one of Lennon’s signature just after he signed his name on papers dissolving the Beatles (price: US$10,000). There was also a shot Pang took that she says is the “last known photograph” of Lennon and McCartney together (price: US$2,450).
Mark Plotkin, 69, Pang’s friend who turned out for the opening, recalled accompanying her to the 2002 George Harrison memorial concert in London. Following the show, Pang led him to an “after-after party,” where he heard someone say in a familiar British voice, “Oh my God, May Pang!”
“There was Paul McCartney with all these people around him, and it was like the Red Sea parted and he gave her a big hug,” Plotkin said. “She was the ultimate rock queen.”
A few feet away, Margaret Lusterman, 61, a retired federal worker, said the photos made her contemplate the anguish she imagines Pang suffered when Lennon went back to Ono. “To be dumped by a lover and it was so public - that must have been so hurtful,” Lusterman said. “It’s not like she got any alimony.”
In July 1983, when she was 32, Pang landed on the cover of Us magazine, smiling alongside a headline that promised her “exclusive” account of “life as John’s live-in lover – 18 months of manic music, suicidal binges, murder attempts, mind control and sex.”
Pang’s memoir led to appearances on the talk show circuit, where her inquisitors included Joan Rivers and Maury Povich. Geraldo Rivera referred to Pang as Lennon’s “mistress” and asked her about reports that the Beatle was gay.
“To me, he was a great lover,” she replied.
As for whether Lennon had been physically abusive, as she reported in her memoir, Pang told Rivera, “He threw me against the wall” (she also wrote that Lennon, after he thought that she tried to stop him from taking a drink, “put his hands to my throat and began to strangle me,” an anecdote she now says was “exaggerated” by her co-author).
Her relationship with Lennon began when Ono decided she and her husband needed a break from their marriage and asked Pang to become Lennon’s companion. Pang rejected Ono’s invitation before eventually warming up to Lennon when he, as she says, “charmed the pants off me.”
One night during his separation from Ono, Lennon was ejected from Los Angeles’s Troubadour nightclub for heckling the Smothers Brothers, a well-publicised incident that fed speculation he had lost control. There were happier moments, too, including visits Pang helped arrange with his son, Julian, from whom he was distant. And there were extraterrestrial moments, such as when Lennon and Pang, both naked on their terrace, said they saw a UFO flying over Manhattan (“On the 23rd Aug. 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O. – J.L.” appears in the liner notes of his Walls and Bridges album.)
Ono remained in constant contact, calling Lennon and Pang numerous times daily, and telling Pang at one point that Lennon should return to her. Not long after, Pang tearfully recalled in the documentary, Lennon announced that “Yoko has allowed me to come home.” Only days before, Pang said, she and Lennon had been making plans to buy a house in Montauk, New York, and fly to New Orleans to visit McCartney. Suddenly, he was back with Ono.
The question of Pang’s significance in Lennon’s life is fodder for that most studious of rock subcultures, Beatle-ologists. Larry Kane, a journalist who wrote three Beatles books, said Lennon told him at one point that he was “deeply in love with someone and that person worked for them” though “he never said her name.”
For all of the photographs of them together in public, Lennon rarely, if ever, spoke at length about Pang during interviews, though he identified her as “production coordinator” on his solo albums, as well as Mother Superior in the credits on his 1975 Rock ‘n’ Roll album.
“It’s hard to say it’s a good time, a fun time, a productive time when you’re sitting next to your wife,” Pang said, explaining why Lennon may not have mentioned her during the joint Playboy interview he and Ono gave when he spoke of his “lost weekend.”
Elliot Mintz, Ono’s longtime spokesperson, declined to comment.
Tim Riley, author of an acclaimed Lennon biography, said it’s not surprising he returned to Ono, “his artistic partner. He never had that with May Pang or anyone else.”
“I don’t think it was a serious relationship on his part,” Riley said. “The power differential was considerable. He wasn’t running away with May Pang. He was having a vacation from his marriage that was authorised.”
After Lennon left, Pang said they remained in contact, sometimes meeting up secretly. Nine years after Lennon’s death, she married record producer Tony Visconti and had two children before they divorced in 2000. Her thoughts, it seems, never stray far from Lennon. She still has mementos from their time together, including a drawing he made of her in which she is tall enough to reach the clouds. She also has the mattress they slept on (it’s in storage). When she sees a reminder of him, like the decorative “Lennon” license plate she spotted one day on a passing truck, she said she thinks “he’s watching over me.”
“I have no closure with him,” Pang said. “How can I have closure when he says, ‘I have to find a way for us to be together’ and then he’s killed?
At the gallery in Alexandria, Pang offered to answer anyone’s questions.
No, she said when asked about her relationship with Ono, she has not spoken to Lennon’s widow in years. Yes, she said, Lennon and McCartney could very well have written more songs together.
As for a query about the complexities of her relationships with Lennon and Ono, Pang said, “You’ll have to see the movie.”
The next day, she was back signing more prints and posters while a trailer for the documentary played in a corner on an unceasing loop.
“My name is May Pang,” the audio repeated all day, “and this is my story.”
A woman who drove from Charlottesville thanked her for helping Lennon spend time with Julian. A Smithsonian research fellow said he was “gobsmacked” to meet her.
A mother and daughter slid into the chairs across from her. Now it was Pang who had a question.
“How old are you?” she asked the daughter.
Twenty-four.
“All this happened by the time I was 24,” Pang said. “I grew up faster than I wanted to. Enjoy yourself.”
Then she uncapped her pen and signed another poster.
Ebony Lamb performs Successful Feelings. Made with funding from NZ On Air. Video / Locals Only