“Paul and Linda were always visiting us when they were in New York,” says May Pang. “They just showed up, all the time. All of a sudden, the doorbell would ring, and I’d go, ‘Who could that be?’ They’d just show up. ‘Oh, it’s Paul and Linda downstairs! Send them up!’”
It only took one short sentence for Pang to blow up two slices of conventional Beatle wisdom about John Lennon in the 1970s. Many Beatles fans have always been under the impression that Lennon and Paul McCartney were estranged from each other in the ’70s apart from three or four friendly encounters. But Pang witnessed the continuing friendship after an acrimonious breakup of the two most celebrated songwriters and rock stars in history. McCartney and Lennon in their thirties were mates, just as they had been in their teens.
The other thing in that short sentence that a lot of Beatlemaniacs had gotten wrong was that the so-called “lost weekend” of Lennon’s life was spent in Los Angeles. Yes, L.A. was an important part of that year-and-a-half-long “weekend,” but most of that time was spent in Lennon’s beloved New York City.
May Pang was there. The lost weekend began with Pang and ended with Pang. Indeed, along with her first boyfriend, Lennon, she was the lost weekend. The phrase as it has applied to Lennon all these years, by the way, came from the late Beatle himself, referring in a Playboy magazine interview to those 18 months as his “lost weekend,” a reference to the 1945 movie starring Ray Milland as an alcoholic in a downward spiral.
With her recent documentary film, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, and her release of a stunning array of candid Lennon photographs, Pang aims to set the record straight on this significant period in Lennon’s life. And spoiler, Lennon was not “lost” during that year and a half, and neither was he in a constant state of inebriation with little productivity. It was a musically prolific time for the former Beatle, and to top it all off, he was in love. With May Pang.
Native New Yorker Pang at age 19 in 1970 landed a clerical job at ABKCO, Allen Klein’s management company. He was the guy who just happened to manage Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Lennon at the time, all of whom had recently become ex-Beatles. Her frequent work with Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, soon led to exclusive employment within their music business. She became part of, not that you could tell, because she was under a black sheet in a demonstration of their avant-garde art projects. She also coordinated one of their art shows and worked on several of their films.
