Hollywood
by Janet Donovan | on June 29th, 2025 |Photo credit: Janet Donovan
At a photo exhibition entitled The Lost Weekend: The Photography of May Pang which coincided with the release of the Lennon/Pang Feature Film Documentary The Lost Weekend: A Love Story held at Washington’s famously eccentric O Street Mansion, May Pang wasn’t just revisiting the past—she was re-centering herself in it. The photographs on the wall captured fleeting, almost impossibly candid moments with John Lennon.
Pang, poised and reflective at the podium, was offering something deeper than nostalgia. She was offering reclamation — of history, of heritage, of voice. May Pang is part of an unfinished duet: John Lennon’s other love story.
She was supposed to be the assistant. The go-between. The girl who took the calls and fetched the tea. Instead, May Pang became something else entirely: the woman who loved—and was loved by—John Lennon during the most unexpected, unfiltered period of his life.
It was 1973 when Lennon, frayed by his unraveling marriage to Yoko Ono, found himself in need of escape. In an eyebrow-raising twist, it was Ono herself who nudged Pang, then a 22-year-old employee at Apple Records, into the role of Lennon’s “companion.” Pang didn’t ask for the assignment, but she accepted it—with the measured calm.
“It was Yoko’s idea,” Pang has said many times, often to skeptical ears. “She said, ‘He needs to get out, he needs to have fun, and I think you’re the person to do it.’” Pang didn’t just step into Lennon’s life—she lit it up.
The nearly 18-month period that followed would later be dubbed “The Lost Weekend,” a phrase Lennon borrowed from the 1945 film about a tortured alcoholic. But in Pang’s telling—and now, through her widely discussed photo exhibitions and her documentary The Lost Weekend: A Love Story—the title is a misnomer. If anything, those months were a found chapter. A moment in which Lennon, freed from the gothic emotional architecture of the Ono orbit, returned to himself. He drank too much, yes. But he also reconnected with his son Julian, collaborated with old friends (including Paul McCartney for a brief, legendary jam), and made music that reflected a softer, sillier, more reflective soul. Pang was not a bystander to this rebirth. She was its unlikely muse.
“He was not lost,” Pang insists. “He was found. We had fun. We laughed. He was happy.”
Their relationship was a strange sort of open secret. In public, Lennon and Pang were seen together constantly—on beaches, in studios, at parties in L.A. with Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr. Yet she was rarely given her due, branded instead as a footnote or, worse, a distraction. It didn’t help that Lennon eventually returned to Ono, and the narrative was neatly stitched up: John wandered, then came back home. Pang, supposedly, was just a detour.
But Pang never bought that version. And now, neither should we.
May Pang
What emerges in her recollections and her arresting photographs displayed at The O Street Mansion—is a version of Lennon far removed from the iconography. He’s smiling, goofy, resting his head on her lap. He is not the tortured genius nor the activist provocateur. He is, instead, startlingly normal. “He was warm, he was generous, and he was very, very funny,” Pang says. “He wasn’t trying to be John Lennon. He was just being John.”
More than five decades later, Pang is reclaiming her place—not as a muse or a side character, but as a woman who knew Lennon in a way no one else did. Not in the fever dream of Beatlemania. Not under the kaleidoscope of New York’s avant-garde. But in real light. Daylight.
And in that light, the so-called ‘Lost Weekend’ doesn’t look lost at all. It looks like love. Imperfect, temporary, but undeniably true.
She reflected on her ‘now.’
“I’m having a great time showing the other side of John at my exhibition which you see in the pictures.”
That “other side” isn’t just Lennon barefoot in the kitchen or relaxed in the California sun—it’s Pang’s side. Long cast in the shadow of a rock legend, Pang’s presence at the exhibition was something of a soft rebellion. Not against Lennon—she remains fond, even protective of him—but against the narratives that have long overlooked her.
Yet what caught her off guard was not the public’s fascination with the Beatles years, but something far more intimate: the reaction from the Asian community, particularly Chinese-Americans, who were seeing a part of themselves in her story for the first time.
“For the first time, a few people in the Asian community realized that there’s a Chinese person that was high up and that was famous, that went out with a famous man,” she said. “I actually had somebody write to me from a museum who was representing some of the Chinese museums. He said, ‘I have no idea that we had a Chinese person that had gone out of the famous man of the 20th, 21st century. And he goes, how come we don’t know this?’”
How indeed?
“If I could represent the Chinese race in this sense, and it’s my heritage, then I’d like that,” Pang said, visibly moved. “Because there’s a lot of girls that have come up to me recently that said, you’re my role model. And I never thought of that—if I could help them.”
For Pang, identity wasn’t something she always wore comfortably. “When I was younger, I went to school and all I kept wanting was to be white,” she admitted. That ache for assimilation is something many first-generation children understand too well. But Lennon pushed her to embrace what she had tried so long to suppress. John made her realize he liked the way she looked and that mattered.
Their dynamic, though unequal in fame, was more emotionally reciprocal than many might have guessed. She became his grounding force. She describes a post-Beatles Lennon still stumbling into adulthood. “He never got a chance to explore a lot of stuff because being in the Beatles, you’re doing a million things, everybody’s doing it for you.”
Then came the inevitable question, one that’s followed her for decades: Why call the documentary “The Lost Weekend?” “That’s one of those titles that stuck,” Pang explained. The phrase wasn’t hers. “They asked John many years ago, ‘You and Harry Nilsson were out and you got thrown out of different clubs. What was it like?’ And he goes, ‘Ah, I can’t remember anything. It’s like a lost weekend.’”
The phrase, borrowed from a 1945 film about addiction and erasure, became shorthand for the 18 months Lennon and Pang were together—months often treated as a detour, a blip, an indulgence. “It got stuck as the reference of my time period,” she said. “So people have a tendency to—the media or whoever—want to keep it going. So they always thought it was about me and him. It wasn’t about me and him.”
She saw the narrative solidifying around her—and made the decision to rewrite it. “So I decided to take that title and use it in my narrative. That’s how people are referring it.”
But the story didn’t end with those months. “We just stayed in touch all the way to the end of his life,” Pang revealed.
What she did help facilitate, however, was Lennon’s reconciliation with his ex-wife and son. “When I was around, Cynthia and John had never had that closure when they got divorced. So I thought reconciliation was a good thing. It was good for their son. He hadn’t seen him in three years.”
May Pang doesn’t just reflect on John Lennon — she reclaims her identity, her heritage and her place in the story. She isn’t dwelling in the past — she’s re-framing it. Pang shared not only images of John Lennon few have seen, but also a deep, personal reckoning with identity, visibility and the weight of history.
Through it all, Pang remained ambivalent about fame. “I never considered myself a celebrity at all,” she said. “So sometimes I’m really taken aback by it.” Fans would ask for autographs, and she’d demur: “No, you don’t want mine… you want that guy.”
But now, decades later, it’s clear people do want hers. Her photos. Her words. Her perspective. Her story.