‘People will find out’: May Pang on her time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

In a new documentary, the woman who went from assistant to lover of the ex-Beatle talks about her side of a misunderstood story

Smack in the middle of the 1970s, John Lennon experienced what he famously called a “lost weekend”, echoing the title of a classic 1945 movie about an out-of-control alcoholic. Given that description, people naturally viewed that “weekend” – which actually lasted 18 months and which coincided with Lennon’s separation from Yoko Ono – as a period of great excess and deep regret. Yet, according to May Pang, who was Lennon’s 22-year-old live-in lover during that time, that was anything but the case. “He was getting to hang out with his friends and have a lot of fun,” she said. “And, because I was 10 years younger, we were getting to do all the things young couples do.”

Pang insists that the ex-Beatle only used the term “lost weekend” to refer to that time because he was tired of the press constantly asking him about two high-profile incidents in 1974 in which he was tossed from an Los Angeles club for being inebriated and verbally abusive. “He would sarcastically say to them: ‘Hey it was a drunken weekend, OK?’” Pang said. “People don’t understand that the phrase wasn’t about our relationship.”