May Pang talked openly about her mid-1970s long-term relationship with John Lennon in the run-up to the movie The Lost Weekend: A Love Story. When John Lennon relocated to California and began recording the covers album Rock and Roll, he referred to his extended absence from Yoko Ono as “the lost weekend” and invented the phrase.
Ono chose Pang to be Lennon’s girlfriend when he was in California in the early phases of their breakup. Prior to it, Pang had worked as the Lennons’ assistant. Ono urged Pang to go out with her husband.
Pang said that she had little influence over Ono’s strategy while speaking about her relationship with Lennon, 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.”
Pang also reported Ono seeking a divorce as a result of Lennon’s drinking, 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.”
Lennon and Ono reconnected in 1975 after his return to New York, and they remained partners even after his death in 1980. Pang and Lennon did continue to get along. “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.”
When recalling her final recollections of John Lennon, Pang also suggested the idea of her and Lennon reconnecting, stating, “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.”
Pang expressed going over her relationship breaking down in 1980 while talking about their time together. “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.”
