How Yoko picked a young beauty to be Lennon’s new lover... then bitterly regretted it
She was the couple’s 22-year-old PA who describes in a new documentary how she gave the Beatle the happiest time of his life – to the fury of his wife
Pang. Ono wasn’t entirely out of the picture. She rang up to 15 times a day, at all hours, demanding a ‘full report’ from Pang on how they were getting on.
According to Pang, Ono thought she and her husband would only stay together for a few weeks.
And Ono miscalculated again, she says, when she suggested they divorce, not anticipating Lennon would agree. Yoko extricated herself from the mess by saying, as she often did, that ‘the stars weren’t right’. Ono blamed Pang for making their affair public but she insists that was Lennon’s decision, kissing her passionately in a bar where the crowd included Paul Newman after a heavy night drinking Brandy Alexander cocktails. It was quickly all over the papers.
Soon they were being stalked by paparazzi which, for Pang, had an upside: ‘John gave me the confidence to express myself.
‘I wasn’t just walking behind him any more. We were the centre of attention wherever we went.’
When Lennon decided to record another album with his LA rock ’n’ roll friends, he based himself in a beachside house once used by Marilyn Monroe for her affairs with the Kennedys.
‘John liked the idea of making love in the same bed as JFK and Marilyn Monroe,’ Pang recalls. Paul and Linda McCartney came to visit and even joined in a jam (with Stevie Wonder on keyboards and Pang on tambourine).
‘And in that moment, five years of animosity and anger simply disappeared,’ says Pang of what would be the last time the two Beatles played together. ‘Little did I know that Paul was here to deliver a message from Yoko.’ McCartney had recently visited Ono in New York and had agreed to pass on an ultimatum to Lennon: if he still loved her, he had to come back to New York and ‘court’ her with flowers and romance.
Pang insists Lennon didn’t like being told what to do and rejected her terms, saying: ‘I’m with May’. (Ono told a different story in 2010 when she thanked McCartney for ‘saving’ her marriage.)
After the album, they did return to New York in 1974 and moved in to a small penthouse with two cats. Lennon was now sober and Julian would come to stay. John resumed his career too, embarking on collaborations with Elton John, David Bowie and Mick Jagger.
PR man King recalls many of them saying they ‘all had their best times with John when he was with May’. Jagger, he said, acknowledged it was the only time he really got to see his friend.
Pang says Lennon snubbed Ono at the premiere of a musical based on The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album, insisting May sat next to him, with Yoko at the back. ‘Sitting in the back of the theatre didn’t sit well with Yoko Ono,’ says Pang. She says Ono rang her to say it was time she retrieved her husband.
ThAT November, husband and wife reconnected backstage at Madison Square Garden after an Elton John gig. Pang saw Lennon and Ono talking closely together. The following February, Lennon and Pang visited a house he wanted to buy near Jagger’s compound on Long Island when Yoko phoned.
Lennon was plagued by smokingrelated breathing problems and Ono said she knew of a therapist who could break his nicotine habit through hypnosis. She suggested he return to their Dakota building home for treatment.
Pang was uneasy but Lennon insisted he’d soon be back. But he wasn’t and she only met him again by chance a few days later.
Still tearful as she recalls the details, Pang — who went on to have an 11-year marriage to record producer Tony Visconti — says Lennon told her: ‘Listen, Yoko’s allowed me to come home.’
It was a very odd remark for a man who’d convinced her he genuinely loved her. They actually continued to see other, ‘often intimately’, over the next five years until he was shot dead by deranged fan Mark Chapman.
Lennon confided to Beatles biographer Larry Kane that he’d loved Pang and ‘may have been the happiest I’ve ever been’ in his time with her, but added: ‘I love Yoko, too. Finding where you belong can be most difficult.’
having found out the hard way where Lennon felt he belonged, May Pang certainly knows what he means.