‘John will probably start going out with other people. I know he likes you a lot. So...?’
JOHN Lennon was very drunk at the party. It was January 1973 and the former Beatle had met a girl, taken her into a room and had sex with her. Everyone knew what was going on. It was the room where all the coats had been left on the bed and it was late. People wanted to go home, but couldn’t get their coats.
“It was very embarrassing,” Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, who had been at the New York party, told me later.
She’d long known that when John got drunk he could become irrational, even violent. So she always limited the amount of alcohol in their apartment.
But there was no limit on drinks and drugs at the party and other partygoers would say John was blabbering and shouting before he disappeared into the bedroom.
“John can be very hard to live with sometimes,” was Yoko’s only criticism.
Next day, John was full of remorse. But after nearly five years together, the myth of perfect love they had woven around themselves was shattered.
An extraordinary 18 months would soon follow
– the so-called “lost weekend” – when John and Yoko lived almost entirely separate lives; she alone in New York, he in Los Angeles with a young mistress. Perhaps oddest of all, it was a mistress proposed, hand-picked, groomed and controlled by Yoko.
It was a period that saw John reunited with many old friends, Mick Jagger, Keith Moon, even Paul McCartney, happy to pick up where they left off before Yoko came on the scene. Lennon and McCartney were even talking about reforming their legendary songwriting partnership.
John and Yoko had set up home in the Dakota building, one of Manhattan’s most fashionable addresses, in February 1973 – just a few weeks after the incident at the party.
THEY would be happy there, but the excitement had gone out of their marriage and their sex life. John wanted to get away, but felt he couldn’t go alone. Yoko had an idea.What about May Pang, their pretty young assistant?
Twenty-two years old, she was always cheerful and willing.What she wasn’t, having been raised in a Chinese immigrant family, was sophisticated or worldly wise.
One morning, as May would later recall,Yoko made her move: “Listen, May, John and I aren’t getting along... John will probably start going out with other people. I know he likes you a lot. So...?”
May was stunned, out of her depth. John was her boss and he was married. She batted back the proposition. But, she would tell me, Yoko persisted. To Mrs Lennon it seemed a logical solution that John and May should get together. “Don’t worry about a thing,” Yoko said. “It’s cool. I’ll take care of everything.”
A few nights later, at Yoko’s suggestion, May went to the studio with John and, when recording was over, allowed him to go back to her apartment and spend the night. Yoko was so delighted that when she had to attend a feminist convention in Chicago, she suggested May move into the Lennon’s apartment.
It would be convenient for her and John, she said. In the event, it turned out to be more convenient for the new lovers to run away to Los Angeles.
John and May were together for most of the next 18 months. If Yoko was hurt, she never admitted it.
On the contrary, she would tell me, it was she who sent John and May to Los Angeles. She had to be seen to be in control.
John may have thought he was off the leash, but Yoko would phone regularly. Morning and night, sometimes a dozen times a day, she would remind May to make John happy, take care of him and keep him out of trouble. That was her job.
Surrounded by musicians again, John wanted to get back to work and, teaming up with record producer Phil Spector, he began an album of the rock and roll standards.
But he reckoned without Spector’s huge ego and soon the recording sessions became open house, with a megalomania.
The drink never stopped flowing and soon May discovered the Jekyll and Hyde effect it could have on her lover-boss.
One night, after a heated argument with the producer, John drank so much he was in no fit state to record.With the help of a bodyguard, Spector got him into a car and drove him home. There they dragged John up to the bedroom, and tied him hand and foot before leaving. Inevitably, John broke free – and trashed the house.
When Yoko learned what had happened, she blamed May for not doing her job properly. It bothered May that Spector wore a gun in a shoulder holster, but John was convinced that the bullets in it were blank. Then one night, a provoked Spector pulled out the gun, waved it above his head and pulled the trigger. The bullet had been real. Shaken, John tried to make a joke of it. “Listen, Phil, if you’re going to kill me, kill me. But don’t f*** with my ears. I need them,” he said. As fond as John was of May, his behaviour continued to be unpredictable. On one occasion he had sex with a groupie and ordered May back to New York.
Deeply upset, May went, only to be taken out by Yoko and asked to return to Los Angeles. With the rock and roll sessions unfinished and Spector in hiding, John agreed to produce an album for his friend and drinking partner Harry Nilsson. Hearing about the project, Ringo Starr flew in to join the team, as did another drummer, Keith Moon. On the first night of recording, who should turn up but Paul McCartney and his wife Linda. It was the first time John and Paul had been in the same room since The Beatles’s split. Would there Spector displaying hysterical